


From The Abyss of An Empire

by Melody_Of_The_River



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Spies & Secret Agents, Cold War, Drama, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Every chapter is based on one song, F/M, Gen, Gun Violence, Heavy Anti-Semitic language, Hurt/Comfort, Kylo Ren/Ben is a KGB agent, Kylo is your emo damaaged spy, Lou Reed - Freeform, M/M, Mafia AU, Multi, Period-Typical Anti-Semitism, Political AU, Politics, Rey is a CIA operative, Rey is a punk rock chick, Russian Mafia, Slow Burn, Snoke is an Anti-Semitic bastard, The Beatles - Freeform, cold war au, mozart - Freeform, pink floyd - Freeform, spy AU, ultravox, with a tragic backstory, with a walkman like Peter Quill's
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-02
Updated: 2018-12-29
Packaged: 2019-03-24 20:30:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 10
Words: 56,463
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13818879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Melody_Of_The_River/pseuds/Melody_Of_The_River
Summary: "What did the world do to you?" she asked him. "That you can't even smile without looking sad?"How could he tell her that he didn't even remember?He's never been anything to anyone. She's a stray dog someone took in and left for dead.They're nothing to them.Just cogs in that machine of a system that keeps turning. Pawns on a giant chess board, that's bigger than their two countries, soldiers in a never-ending game that has been going on, longer than the span of their lives. The players change, but the betrayal, the pain and the greed remains all the same. And in that game, they're pieces of scrap metal that can be melted and molded and broken, to serve any function, at any price, no matter how despicable, no matter how in-human.  They can not tell you how their lips have been sewn shut by years of injustice. Fight the system, and you die. Talk, and you die. Think, and you die.But, the system has to collapse sometime. It is inevitable. The facade must drop.The question is...What, then, will rise from the abyss of the Empire?





	1. Vienna

**Author's Note:**

> This fanfic has been inspired by films like Atomic Blonde, The Man From U.N.C.L.E, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and the novels by John Le Carre. I'm on tumblr, if you want to discuss this fic, comment, or suggest anything. Each chapter will be loosely centered around one songs from the 80's or 70's. Starting from the Ultravox hit, Vienna to... well, you'll see. Stay tuned for an update every two weeks. But I must warn you, I am a student. And we are infamously unreliable.  
> I'm at [melodyoftheriver](https://melodyoftheriver.tumblr.com) I post Star Wars meta, fics, and cool Star Wars edits.  
> Also a big thank you to my beta reader, Lace. She's on tumblr at [whutotthewhut](https://whutotthewhut). All I can say is that she's an absolute legend!

**East Berlin, 1986**

"Hello?"

The flash of lightning cut zig-zag rips into the inky night sky, like a creature desperate to claw its way out from the grasp of the dark gray storm clouds. One, two, three seconds later, the sky was filled with a roaring peal of thunder. Frightening the girl from her trance, she looked up at the monstrous sky, like a beast waiting to engulf the city whole. The door started rattling as the rain started to pour down, slowly at first, and then haphazardly all at once.  The air was silent except for the loud splatter of rain on the roof, the distant wail of car horns and sirens, and the occasional sound of people laughing on the television, and sometimes, a scream. The call box was a cramped pitiful little space, polluted and filthy, with all sorts of colorful profanities decorating its inner walls in a multitude of languages, truly representative of the cultural hub that was, Berlin.

"Hello?" She demanded, this time louder, more out of breath and angrier. Clutching the hand set tighter in her hand, she repeated, "Hello!?"

She could hear the faint breathing of a man on the other side of the phone. She heard him clear his throat, "Your code, Agent?"

The rain continued, getting faster and louder by the minute. It was distracting and the girl clenched her jaw to stop her teeth from chattering nervously. She shook her head.

"It's not safe - I'm- I'm in a public place- I can't-" she stammered, placing her trembling hand on the transparent wall beside the phone to steady it.

The man seemed not to hear her. "Your code, Agent?" The man's voice firmly repeated, in the same monotonous style. For a moment, she wondered if the voice she heard was just an operating system, a cold unfeeling machine that sent her to each slaughter. She would have to dwell on the irony later, not now. She wasn't safe and each second made her situation more dangerous.

 

The girl let out a breathy exhale, smoothed her trembling palm over her drenched coat and spoke again:

"Rey." She hesitated for a second.

More silence. The Impersonal voice was waiting.

 "It was a pleasure to burn," she finally said, repeating her code to the invisible man on the other side, for the hundreth time, the words that bring her the news of another mission. Another life she'd have to take.  Closing her eyes and resting her forehead against the telephone, she silently mouthed the words again, almost a whisper, hoping they could somehow save her from what was inevitably to follow.

The man behind the curtain considered this for a moment, while Rey dug her nails into her palms, in anticipation of her next order. _Who was it going to be this time,_ she wondered. _Would they die quick at the wrong end of one of her rifles, or would it be bloody and cruel like the last time?_

 _Ah. The last time._ The trembling of her hand increased as the memory flashed across her eyes. A shiver ran down her spine.

The man cleared his throat again. When he spoke, Rey already knew what he was going to say. "He'll be at the _Junges Blut_ tonight." Pause. "When you get there, you'll find one of our operatives, Rose. She'll tell you where to find him from there."

"Who's the target?"

"You'll know when you get there."

She was about to say something in reply, before the call was abruptly disconnected and the repetitive beep of the phone filled the booth.

" _Zehn Pfennig, Bitte,"_  came the feminine voice of the  automated system from the receiver. Rey took out a penny from the front pocket of her jeans and stuck it into one of the coin holes beneath the dialing pad.

She put the receiver back onto the switch hook with a _tring._ And rested her head against the back wall and raised her right arm to look at her wrist watch. _7.45 pm._ It was almost nightfall. She'd better hurry if she was going to reach the bar in time, she thought, but couldn't find the strength to will herself to move. Instead, she let  her head rest against the wall, water trickling down her hair on her forehead and sideburns. Her trembling hand  clutched the door handle, her only anchor.

After a while, she stood up straight, and started rummaging through her pockets for her walkman. She found it- a blue boxy Sony model- in one of the long pockets of her knee length black coat and pulled it out along with her orange pair of ear-on headphones. She attached the clip of the walkman with her belt and reached up to fit the pair of headphones over her ears but discovered that her pair of black sunglasses was still perched up on the crown of her head. Removing the glasses, she folded them and hung them on the front of her black t-shirt.

Inserting the end of the headphones in the walkman, she opened it to reveal the cassette present inside. _Vienna_ by _Ultravox. A_ lmost completely finished. "Fuck," she muttered under her breath, she forgot to rewind the tape again. Looking through her pockets again, she found a half sharpened pencil in the back pocket of her midnight blue jeans and stuck it into one of the holes of the tape and began the time-taking and extremely annoying process of rewinding a tape. After about five minutes of effort,which left her fingers aching, she finally put the tape back into the walkman and hit play.

The sound of sweet bells, like ticks of a clock, harmoniously synchronized with the soft notes of a piano of the starting track, "Astradyne" filled her ears, the ticks raising the anticipation and the tension of the song with every passing second, quite like what Rey was feeling at the moment. With every long drawn out sigh and breath, she was delaying the inevitable, for sure, but that just made the tension rise all the more. By the time the drums rolled in, she knew that she had spent too much time ticking away, and now the beat must drop.  She nodded her head to the beat of the drums, and pushed the door open with a jerk. Her stark clothing was in complete contrast to the preppy optimistic tune ringing in her ears. Her black knee length leather coat-jacket enveloped tightly around her small frame, like a quilt to make her disappear into the darkness of the night. The cold East Berliner wind blew around her as if to flake away the last remnants of her identity, and when she stepped out of that tiny phone booth, she knew that what little resemblance she had with the little naive intelligence gatherer, was now completely gone.

If her clothes hadn't already been drenched, she was soaked from head to toe now. The rain was coming down in sheets, so hard that it was bouncing off the stone pavement beside the call box. In her dull colorless garb, Rey looked like every single other person in this God-forsaken part of town but it was a good thing I suppose. The American was never one to blow her cover.

She pulled up the hood of her jacket, and started walking down the lonely road passing rows and rows of gray buildings on cold gray streets, with the music in her ears like a forgotten soundtrack.  She watched people huddled under temporary tin roofs, around fires lit in trash cans or dumpsters pulling their jackets and scarves tighter around themselves to shield from the harsh windy rain. They would look at her from time to time as she passed by, probably wondering what a young girl like her was doing outside in weather like this, but they would avert their eyes as soon as they would remember that the _only_ people who are ever outside in a weather like this, in a city like Berlin. Whores, or killers.

To them, she was probably both.

 _Der Junges Blut_ turned out to be a mere five minute walk from the call box. She stopped when she approached it, lowering the volume of her walkman to listen around, staying aware for enemies. On the pavement of the building right next to the bar, people were huddled around a fire lit in a huge green trash can and in the light of fire she could finally see all the graffiti adorning the gray lifeless walls of the structure. One message  striking against the vibrant clashes of color.

 _"_ _Großer Bruder sieht dich._   Big Brother is watching you."

Beneath the words in big, bold, capital letters, was a poor likeness of Stalin, his features altered for comedic effect: his nose was a lot bigger, his cheeks widened to make him look childlike, and his moustache, for all intents and purposes looked like a dead rat. Yet the artist who painted him did nothing to his eyes. You could expect nothing kind from those eyes. Those were the eyes that would strike fear in the hearts of children, the eyes that would gladly plunge great nations into a three-decade long war. Eyes, that would search your soul and root out even the slightest hints of disloyalty. Eyes that would watch you hang.

She followed the graffiti up, to the top of the building, past the rows of lifeless windows,  some with clothes hung on them and some with the curtains drawn. Watched as a red hammer-and-sickle Soviet flag burned on the opposite end of the alley.

If a reference from the _Liste der auszusondernden Literatur_ (the list of banned books) wasn't enough to ensure the attention from the Soviet Military, the burning flag made it quite certain. Rey wondered for a moment, what would become of the inhabitants of the building come the morrow. But the thought was gone before she could allow herself to care.

The building of the bar itself, was very shabby. It was more colorful than the architecture surrounding it, but that wasn't saying much. The structure was old and worn out, the wood of the door and the windows was flaky and riddled with termites. The whole thing seemed like it was barely standing up. The door had a huge green neon sign at the front, that flickered, but mostly remained inactive and that had the 't' of _Blut_ inverted. It dealt mostly in greens and grays too but the warm lights of the inside were enough to distinguish it from the cold damp darkness of the outside. The rain had slowed to a soft strum now. And night had officially, completely fallen.

Rey hurried inside the bar without wasting anymore time.

Inside the bar, she was surprised at the amount of people that had been crammed into one tiny little space. The design of the bar was simple, a counter with a few dozen chairs around it, a dance floor with rotating lights on the top and everywhere else was empty space, and abandoned dark corridors leading to the back exits or dimly lit bathrooms. The warm glow of the lights, yellow, greens and blues, and the combined heat of the scores of people inside the bar made it hot enough for her to want to take off her jacket after a while. Inside, she wore a simple black t-shirt, blue jeans, her wet hair was pulled back, away from her eyes by her headphones and the music was still faintly playing in her ears.

She didn't hear whatever romantic bullshit they were playing on the loud speaker that made all the couples slow dance in the middle of the dance floor, because in her ears, the album was still playing on her walkman, the soft piano had slowly morphed, giving way to the warning drums of the next track, "Private Lives".

Suddenly, she felt a hand around her arm jerking her into one the corridors and her first instinct would've been to hit the person --a young Asian girl with a cute round likeable face and short hair pulled back into a ponytail and some stray strands sticking to the sides of her face-- but the girl was muttering something. Rey pulled down her headphones with a jerk, in time to hear her say,

"It was a pleasure to burn."

Rey exhaled, relaxing into the girl's soft grip on her arm, letting her pull her into the darkened corridor.

"I'm Rose," she heard her say, "You must be Rey."

"Yes."

"Good."

She followed this new girl, Rose, through a long corridor into the bathroom and the girl locked the door behind her with a thud and stood with her back to the door.

The bathroom, lit by a single flickering greenish blue light, was absolutely filthy, as one would expect bathrooms at a small bar to be. Its white tiles were stained yellow with urine and other body fluids, that Rey didn't want to think about. Rey checked that no one was in the two stalls adjacent to the washbasin, throwing open the doors that vibrated from the force of her push, before she came back to where the girl, Rose, was standing and turned on the water tap.

"Talk, " Rey commanded, discarding her jacket to reveal her damp black t-shirt that was sticking to her body, running her fingers through her hair and pulling them out of her eyes.

Without saying a word, Rose started digging through the pockets of her own brown trench coat to find a small brown envelope and handed it to Rey. Without pausing to look at it, Rey shoved the envelope into her front jean pocket.

"This has everything you need to know."

"Who do I have to kill?"

The girl sighed.

"The man is called Kylo Ren," the girl paused, hushing her voice to a bare whisper before continuing, "KGB bloodhound, basically.He's been hunting down our operatives working on infiltrating the First Order intelligence ring. Damn good at his job, he is. We've lost three operatives already. Only You and Finn are left. There's just one problem..."

"What problem?"

"No one in our intelligence actually knows what he looks like..."

"What?!" Rey hissed. "How in the bloody hell am I supposed to find him when I don't know what he looks like?"

Rose let out an exhausted sigh and continued:

"Look man, the only information we've received as of late has been from a transmission. A transmission between  NPA officer Poe Dameron and _supposedly --"_

"Supposedly? Is the CIA working on suppositions and rumors, now? From the fucking _National People's Army_ of all things?"

"Supposedly _,"_ Rose repeated and, continued, "Kylo Ren. This is some _good_ intel, Rey. Better than we've had in months. While you are on your bloody killing spree, _some_ of us have to spend _years_ undercover, living a lie. Separated from our family, our friends, to even get _half_ of this kind of intelligence."

"You think I'm any different? You think I don't wish I could've had a family? You think I like doing this?" Rey said, a quizzical look on her face, her piercing red rimmed eyes boring into her, and a single lock of wet hair on her forehead.

"Doing what?"

"Killing people."

"I think you certainly reap the benefits."

Rey scoffed, turning around and running her fingers through her hair. "You know nothing, kid."

"Why are we having this argument? We don't mean anything to each other."

"True, that's true," Rey turned her head to look at the girl, "But the kind of thinking you have tells me the CIA thinks they're better than us at the bottom. Scavenging for secrets. Doing their kill jobs for them. They think we're expendable. Like we're nothing."

Rose opened her mouth to say something in reply, but Rey raised her hand to stop her. "Can we trust him? This Poe?"

"Poe Dameron is a damn good agent. Loyal. Hot-headed at times, but trustworthy. We've never had a reason to doubt him. He has given us good intel before. He would never betray us."

"Well, the First Order has a way of getting to people."

"Not this one."

"How can you be sure?" Rey turned around.

"Not this one. Not a chance." Rose shook her head.

Rey sighed. "What was the transmission?"

"What?"

"I said, what was the transmission?"

"Oh." Rose said, looking down on the white tiles of the floor.

"Oh?"

"Well, the transmission was to ask... a location... for an undercover CIA agent..."

"Who?" Rey asked, her eyes narrowing.

Rose remained silent.

Rey grabbed the other girl by her front collar, shaking her aggressively. "Who the _fuck_ was it, Rose?"

Rose looked up at Rey, her bright eyes glimmering with a hint of fear and after a moment of hesitation, she spoke.

"....Rey Jakku."

No sooner than the words had left her mouth, the room was filled with sound of the pop of a silencer gunshot.

Rey looked down at Rose, whose eyes had gone wide now and saw that she was bleeding from the stomach. She was just about to shake Rose awake, when the sound of two, three more gunshots echoed through the bathroom and now the door was almost completely broken and Rose --Rey was sure-- almost completely dead.

Rey had no choice, using Rose's body to shield herself, she hid behind the door while the shooter behind it continued to shoot through the door to make absolutely sure that no one could have survived. Rey's headphones were still in her neck. She pulled them off with a jerk, detaching them from the walk-man and threw it to the side.

Suddenly, their attacker began forcefully stomping on the door. With the amount of bullet holes already in it, she had precious seconds before the structure gave way entirely. Rey immediately released her grip on Rose's lifeless body and threw her in front of the door with a thud.The lock broke, swinging the door open with a slam and a tall man wearing an iron skull mask stepped into the doorway.

 He was dressed head-to-toe in black: black jacket, black checkered shirt, black jeans and mud stained --yet still very much so-- black boots. He stood in the doorway like an intimidating giant, his face and hair covered by that demonic metal mask. Rey hid behind the door, that was barely hanging to its hinges, her small frame easily concealed by the darkness, and tried hard to slow down her breathing and steady her heart beat.

The man --Kylo Ren, though Rey didn't know who he was-- walked in slowly, and looked around for the dead body, finding it lying beneath the sink --the water was still running. He crouched beside the body of the girl, that until a few moments ago had been Rose, lifted his hand and tilted her small head to face him.

From her tiny hiding place behind the door, she could see the man softly moving her hair out of her eyes with a slight movement of his hand. Rose's eyes stared up at him in horror --unmoving, lifeless. And then, he did something in complete contrast to his stark attire. Gently placing his right hand on her forehead, he closed her eyes shut.

Rey didn't know why she was slightly moved by that small act of compassion. His metal mask and dark clothing, made him feel like a looming demon, an emotionless heartless creature, a monster that must be slain. But this tiny human act, a show of remorse and pity, made it feel like there was still flesh and blood in that darkness. Would he extend the same sympathy to Rey after he put a bullet through her skull?

_Pull yourself together, Rey!_

_He had murdered her. In cold blood. And he would do it to you. If you don't do something. Fast._

Kylo reached behind his back, pulled up his jacket to  place his silencer back into the holster he was wearing underneath, just as --

Rey stepped back. Her foot stepping onto the walkman she had discarded mere minutes ago --and she must have pressed a button or something, because just then, the sound of fluttering drums and synthetic bass, like the strong beating of a heart, the beginning of the most beautiful song on the album, "Vienna," filled the room.

_Time's up._

_It's now or never, Rey._

Just as Kylo was about to turn around at the sudden noise, Rey slid her leg across the slippery marble bathroom floor, landing a hard blow to the back of his calf with her leg. Kylo lost his balance at the unexpected hit and fell forward, his mask hitting the hard marble of the sink. With lightning speed, she reached behind him to remove his gun from the holster before he could, and moved away just as quickly --before the man could regain composure and lock her in his iron grasp. She stepped away, pointed the gun to his head and pulled the trigger.

"FUCK!"

The gun was empty! Rey turned it around and with the back of the gun hit the man in the face with as much strength as she could muster, sending his head to another collision with the marble sink. His skull must've been made from stone because despite the prominent dents on his mask, he still jolted back immediately and turned to face her. Raising his hand up to his face, he lifted the mask off.

The first thing Rey noticed about him was his hair --darker than his clothes-- and his eyes that anyone could mistake for black, but in the bluish-green hue of the bathroom looked the darkest shade of brown Rey had ever seen. His lip was cut, a burn on his sharp jaw from where the mask must have scrapped his face when his head hit the sink, and he was bleeding from his nose. He raised his right hand in defeat, lifting his left to wipe the blood of his nose with the end of his jacket.

"I don't want to hurt you," he said, turning his face around to spit on the floor. Blood, Rey noticed, and a single broken tooth.

"Oh yeah? Is that why you just murdered an innocent girl?" Rose's body lay unceremoniously on the floor next to where Kylo was kneeling. A silent witness to their private war.

"There was _nothing_ innocent about this girl," he said, passing a venomous glance in the direction of the body. "She's done things you-"

Rey's patience was running thin. She hit him again straight across the face with the back of the gun. His teeth roughly hit the edge of the sink, and blood started oozing out from under his gums. "I don't have time for this," she said, glancing nervously to the door, "What do you want?"

"You really need to stop doing that," he moaned, spitting another round of blood on the floor.

"Do you _want_ me to hit you again?"

A sigh escaped his mouth, quickly turning into a groan of pain. Rey looked at the door again, wondering whether the bar manager had called the police yet. The ruckus must have been loud. But then again, with the roaring music of the club, it _was_ doubtful anyone had heard them.

Rey had let herself get distracted,a fatal mistake, she hadn't notice the hand that was shooting up from beneath, with a jagged knife --directed at her. She hadn't seen it but she  felt it, the blade tearing through her jeans and piercing to the bone. She screamed and instinctively moved away from the source of the pain, blood trickling down her calf. They were both standing now. Kylo lunged again, dagger aimed at her abdomen. Rey jumped back, barely avoiding the strike.

"Liar!" Rey growled.

Kylo chuckled darkly, flipping the blade around in his hand. "Self-defence, darling."

Rey could feel her panic rising, she had no weapon and no leverage! Kylo offered no quarters, and advanced relentlessly, equipped with both that dagger and his superior body strength. Rey limped back slowly --the excruciating pain in her leg shooting up her thigh-- searching for a weapon! Anything!

Her eyes searched the bathroom and found a steel plunger propped up against the back wall. _This'll have to do,_ Rey thought, picking it up, tearing off the rubber end and twisting it around in her hands like a spear.

"That's cheating, " the man said, advancing more aggressively towards her.

"You're much bigger than I am."

Metal rod in hand, she moved forward, dodging Kylo's fatal slash and using her small stature to her advantage she slid past and flung the rod at him to land another deafening blow to his skull.

 _The man in the dark in the picture frame..._ the music continued.

Kylo growled, running at Rey with all his strength and jabbing the knife at her, slicing a sharp cut where her liver was. Rey let out a scream but didn't let the pain distract her and just as he was about to tackle her to the floor, she slid behind his tall arms to hit him between the shoulder blades that caused a sudden crippling pain to shoot up his arm and made him drop the knife to the floor. Rey hit him on his thigh, with all the strength she could muster. Kylo lost his balance and fell to his knees.  Rey quickly picked up the knife from beside him as Kylo turned around and almost locked his arms around her abdomen to wrestle her to the floor. But Rey was fast and small, and she slashed the knife against his arm, piercing the flesh to the bone. Kylo's hand instinctively reached up to clutch his wound, as Rey landed a final fatal slash across his face, cutting him across his cheek.

_A voice reaching out in a piercing cry, it stays with you until..._

Kylo fell back in defeat, eyes losing focus, arm losing blood and the bloody cut across his face seemed to split his very soul in half.

 _I have to finish the job,_ Rey thought.

She dragged his body to the now overflowing sink.

_I have to finish the job, I have to finish the job._

Raising his head to sink--

**_The feeling is gone, only you and I._ **

**_This means nothing to me._ **

The music merged with her thoughts as she held Kylo by his hair and, and,and--

She couldn't do it.

She couldn't.

Releasing his grip on the now unconscious man, who fell back on the floor, she stepped back, and slumped against the opposite wall, her bloodied hands clutching her hair and face.

She couldn't do it.

Why couldn't she do it?

_Just finish the job, Rey._

Her train of thought was suddenly interrupted by the shouts of:

_"POLIZEI! POLIZEI!"_

_Fuck,_ Rey muttered under her breath, scrambling to find an exit.

 _"Du bist verhaftet! Ergebe dich jetzt!"_ _You are under arrest! Surrender now!_

She searched the ceiling for a viable escape route, finding a small window at the top corner. She tucked the knife into her coat pocket. And with one last glance at the now two bodies that littered the floor, one alive, one dead, she pushed open the glass with force, climbed out and found herself at the end of an dark abandoned alleyway. Rain still poured down in torrents and Rey hurried to get up on her feet, clutching her stomach where Kylo cut her, and ran, ran, ran as fast as she could.

 

The last thing Kylo heard before sleep took him was the grand crescendo of the song from the little scavenger's walkman, the final notes of the grand piano sounding in conclusion.

**_This means nothing to me._ **

**_Oh, Vienna._ **

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Side note: Rey's secret code, "It was a pleasure to burn" is actually the first line of the book, Fahrenheit 451 by her namesake Rey Bradbury :)


	2. Perfect Day

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Translation for Russian words and phrases at the end.  
> The song is Perfect Day by Lou Reed.

**East Berlin, 1987**

Rey and Kylo sat on opposite ends of a small square wooden table, in a shabby old colorless East Berlin diner, with their guns pointed at each other beneath the table. They were both out of breath, their chests heaving, brows cut, lips bleeding, marks and bruises littered their face and blood trickled down from their forehead onto the red-and-white checkered table cloth. Rey held her arm precariously over her chest, her shoulder was dislocated. And to top off the gruesome display, beneath the table, there was a steel utensil knife jabbed into Kylo's calf.

Beside them, sat their handlers, Finn next to Rey, and the _Lieutenant Colonel_ Armitage Hux next to Kylo Ren. Finn had his one hand over Rey's, the one clutching the gun, trying to make Rey turn it around. He glared at Rey who was making it a point to ignore him as she stared down Kylo from across the table, his frustrated stare almost audibly commanding her to " _Stand down, soldier."_

Meanwhile, Hux took a far less gentle approach. With one arm on Kylo's shoulder, he tried to pry Kylo's fingers off the gun he was holding.

_"Give. It. Here."_

Kylo maintained his iron grip, and without breaking his murderous stare, replied, "Why the hell is _she_ here, Hux?"

"I swear to _Stalin_ , Ren" Hux said, still persistently trying to take the gun out of his grasp, "if you don't give that to me right now, I'll make bloody sure that Snoke puts your name on the next list!"

"Tell her to drop it first!"

"YOU!" Hux bellowed, turning his head to glare at Finn, "Get your little rat to put the gun down, or so help me _God_ -"

"You know," Rey quipped, "I expected someone to be accompanying you here, to stop me from putting an end to your miserable fucking existence once and for all, but this..." Rey gestured  at Hux with her free hand, "I never expected the Lieutenant _fucking_ Colonel to be holding your leash this fine evening, _Ren,"_ she said, poison dripping from every syllable.

"You'll address me properly, you little runt!" Hux said through gritted teeth, "The state appointed title is _First Podpolkovnik_ Armitage Hux!"

"Oh _I'm sorry_ , did I hurt your feelings? You can't blame me, it's easy to miss the First podpol-whatever part when you're out of your fascist uniform. And what the-" Rey paused, eyeing Hux up and down, "what the fuck are you even wearing? Is this your idea of a _casual_ East Berlin cover, you rich fucking prick?" Rey said, remarking on Hux's black tailor-made waist coat, his white dress shirt, fancy blue tie and silver cufflinks. Compared to Rey's now torn and bloodied simple gray t-shirt and black jeans, Finn's t-shirt and jeans ensemble and brown trench coat, and whatever the fuck Kylo's black cloak was supposed to be, Hux looked like an obnoxious millionaire among street felons. Which was probably exactly what he was.  "Forgive me, _Lieutenant Colonel_ if your orange hair doesn't command as much respect as you thought it would."

"Why you-" Hux started but was immediately interrupted by Finn.

"Rey," Finn quietly said, looking away from Hux, red faced and swearing creatively, turning his frame around to shield himself from view, "You need to stop this or we're both gonna get into trouble."

Rey refused to turn her eyes away from her target, staring at Kylo like a wolf about to lunge for the prey.

It was Finn's turn to shout now. "REY!" he scolded, "Listen to me, goddammit!"

"The First fucking Order, Finn?," said Rey, through gritted teeth, without looking away from Kylo's battered face, "This is a level of low I didn't think the CIA could stoop down to."

"Rey." Finn pleaded, "Try to understand. At this moment, we're only alive because we're more use alive than dead. The moment it becomes more work to control us, than it is to keep us, the CIA is gonna throw us away like garbage, and put someone else in our place to deal with the Russians. There's no shortage in their factories for patriotic fools. "

Rey's face betrayed nothing. She looked ahead.

" _Look. At. Me._ "

Reluctantly, Rey broke away her gaze from Kylo's marred face and turned to look at Finn. The look on Finn's face was one of sheer and utter disappointment. Never in his wildest dreams (or nightmares), had he expected that meeting Kylo Ren would incite such a violent response from Rey, even if he was an old enemy who had tried to kill her. Finn had thought he would have been _avoiding_ the catastrophe by not informing Rey of the subject of their meeting. But the moment Rey set her eyes on Ren, and started blindly shooting him outside the diner, Finn realized he had made a grave mistake. A mistake the CIA could have his head for. _If this alliance doesn't work out..._ Finn shuddered to think of the consequences.

"He tried to _kill_ me, Finn," she repeated.

"Rey-"

"I'd like to interrupt what seems like a very cozy discussion,” Kylo cut in, “to say your _pet_ attacked me first."

Moments after he said it, Kylo realized he should not have. But for him the look on Rey's face, mere seconds before catastrophe, was very much worth the pain of being hit with a chair.

Finn should have foreseen what was about to happen when Rey threw a venomous glare in Kylo's direction. Whether or not he could have stopped it was another question entirely.

"NO, REY, STOP-"

The chair smashed into Kylo's face. It was going to be a long day.

* * *

 

"FOR FUCK'S SAKE!" Shouted Hux, handcuffing Kylo to the chair as Finn did the same for Rey.

"This is the _fifth_ _fucking_ diner you've gotten us kicked out of!"

"It's not my fault the _suka_ keeps trying to kill me," said Kylo in Russian, entirely amused by his handler's seething rage.

" _Ukh Ti,_ coming from the man who blew a thousand holes into a door to kill ONE woman!" Rey replied, in her own broken version of Russian.

"First of all," Kylo said, raising a hand to hold up one finger, "your Russian is fucking terrible, you know that? Please don't butcher my language. And secondly," he raised another finger, "I wasn't there to kill you. Technically, you attacked me first, I was just there for the other one," he said, as though it absolved him of all accusation, "What's your excuse, you little American _mutt_?"

" _First of all_ , no one uses that insult, like, ever. Please educate yourself on American norms before you start pretending to be CIA. The accent isn't enough, you know. And _secondly_ , you think I should've greeted you with hugs and kisses, when you broke down the door and killed someone I just met, you Russian pig!"

"American cow!"

"Swine!"

"Bitch."

Rey spat in his face, struggling to get out of the handcuffs. She would be willing to break her wrist if she could get up and slap that smirk off his arrogant face. It would be worth it.

"How long do you think they'll continue like this, traitor?" Hux asked Finn, watching the violent display from afar.

"Long enough, scum. Let's go get a coffee."

"Let's."

Hux rummaged through the pockets of his black pants and fished out a fifty mark note and slammed the bill in front of the bickering couple on the termite-ridden weak wooden table, the surface trembling from the force of his fist.

"We'll be back in a few hours. Don't kill each other, for fuck's sake."

"A FEW HOURS?" Rey and Kylo yelled simultaneously.

" _Ty che, blyad,_ Hux?" Kylo hissed.

Hux muttered back something unintelligible in Russian, that Rey couldn't decipher but from the way Kylo's eyes widened and his face became white, Rey could infer that it was probably a threat more serious than the rest Hux had been spewing all evening. A threat worthy of the title Lieutenant Colonel.

Finn and Hux left. Where to, neither Rey nor Kylo knew but the expressions on their faces as they left, were a silent warning. _If you two don't make this work by today..._

Rey shuddered to think of the consequences. But what could be worse than being forced to team up with a sworn enemy?

The look Kylo gave her, one of sheer unadulterated fear, offered a reply to her silent question. A lot of things could be worse, she concluded.

 

Rey and Kylo sat on opposite ends of a long almost-broken wooden table, a safe five feet distance between them, in absolute silence for three hours. The only words they spoke were when the old lady who ran the diner would come to their table every half an hour or so to ask them if they would like anything to eat, but they would politely refuse. The old lady was hard of hearing and only knew German (a language that was the expertise of neither Kylo nor Rey) so a polite refusal would very soon change into one (or both of them) shouting in broken German into the lady's ears, turning to face her as much as the handcuffs would allow.

After nearly three hours of complete silence between the two, Kylo was the first one to speak.

"You know, I'm a little confused, " he began, to a surprised look from Rey, "You're an _American_ spy. Then why do you have an English accent?"

Rey opened her mouth to answer, and for a moment Kylo thought he might have caught her off guard, but then the expression on her face once again turned into one of anger and hatred.

"Why do _you_ have an American accent? You're KGB, aren't you?" she quipped back.

Kylo sighed. "Look, kid, if you're going to keep being so antagonistic, then we're not getting anywhere." _You know what Hux said_ , he wanted to add.

"I don't trust double-faced people."

"Darling, you _already_ don't trust me. And you've got no other choice except to be civil. Unless you wanna stay handcuffed to this chair all night? Because, honestly, if we're talking handcuff-"

Rey's face blushed red. "Oh fuck you! And your fucking Russian innuendos."

"Russians... they don't have a thing for handcuffs. We're not as sexually repressed as the Americans to find violence appealing."

"Last I checked it was the _Russian_ secret police that hunted down and executed people for fetishes."

"That was thirty years ago."

"Still," Rey insisted, flicking her free hand in the air as though shooing away a fly.

"Oh, and like America is _so_ progressive when it comes to this?"

"I'm not the one boasting our sexual prowess."

"Fair enough," Kylo sighed.

"So, are you gonna answer my question?"

"Which one?" Kylo said, raising an eyebrow, faking ignorance.

"Why do you have an American accent?" Rey repeated, rolling her eyes.

"All spies need convincing covers." Kylo offered, as though it was even remotely a satisfying answer to her query.

"And an _American_ in _East_ Berlin was your idea of a convincing cover?"

"People don't suspect you that much when you don't try to hide. That's why," Kylo paused, his lips curling up into an unmistakable smirk, "it took you a year to find me. And it took _me_ three weeks. Plus, I like it more than the English. Too boring, not me."

"Don't flatter yourself. If I _wanted_ to find you, I would've found you sooner. If I knew that _the man who tried to kill me_ was indeed, the _fearsome,"_ Rey said, her words dripping with sarcasm, "Kylo Ren, I would've found you earlier and killed you in your sleep."

"Whatever makes you feel better, I guess."

Rey groaned, at Kylo's lack of a reaction at her thinly veiled threats, "You are so infuriating."

Kylo chuckled at that, a breathy light-hearted carefree chuckle, momentarily forgetting that he was handcuffed to a metal chair, until he tried to move forward to place both his arms on the table and was painfully reminded of the cold metal cutting against the skin of his wrist. He winced, surprised by the brief look that flashed across Rey's eyes. Was that.... _concern?_

The lighting in the diner was dim. And it was slowly getting dark outside. The sky was a soft dark blue, not quite black just yet. Faint glimmers of remaining sunlight still peaked through the dark clouds, disappearing slowly. The windows were filthy, with hand marks and dust on the glass. But the dim light of the diner reflected from the glass to shine on Rey's soft brown curls. _She's not bad to look at_ , Kylo thought, _I could get used to working with the little scavenger_. 

Around them, people in gray garbs, old people mostly, were eating in silence, barely paying attention to the comparatively loud conversation they were having. _Must be a regular occurrence for them_ , Kylo thought, _beaten up people coming to shabby diners to kick back and relax._

"Why do you have an English accent?" he asked again, his tone softer this time, almost like a request.

"I like it," came back Rey's harsh answer.

"That's a lie."

"Well, you're just going to have to take it, whatever it is."

"Fair enough."

"Stop saying that."

Rey looked away, to the other side of the counter. A young blonde woman was kneading some dough behind it, sweat pouring down her forehead, which she would occasionally wipe away with her right arm. Two old men sat on the far side of the tiny diner, playing a game of checkers or chess, Rey couldn't tell. Rey kept staring, trying to look at anything except the hideous monster in front of her, and think of a plan.

Kylo could practically see the gears turning behind Rey's head, could tell that Rey was trying to avoid him until Finn came back, and knew that when he did, she'd try to kill him again.

"If this alliance is going to work, you need to know two things, kid. One," Kylo said, pausing for effect, "me trying to kill you was nothing personal. Two," Rey turned back to look at him, "this mutual cooperation needs to be _mutual._ So, you need to answer me when I ask you a direct question, Rey," said Kylo, smiling at the surprised look that flashed across Rey's eyes upon hearing her name. _Bastard_ , she thought, _he thinks he can woo me into talking with this sudden change of demeanor._

"Why do you _want_ to work with me, anyway?" Rey asked, annoyed. "There's loads more CIA agents who could help you on your quest to find the Skywalker fellow."

"I didn't ask to get assigned with you," Kylo replied, a bit taken aback that his persuasion made no dents in Rey's strong facade.

"Well, good. Neither did I."

Kylo chuckled, "Well yeah, I can _see_ that."

"You're enjoying this, aren't you, you cheeky bastard?"

"I swear the stuff that comes out of your mouth, kid," Kylo laughed.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"It's surprising that such a tiny thing can have so much anger."

"Well," Rey tore her eyes away from his face to look outside the window, "It's a result of just the right amount of emotional turmoil and political unrest."

Rey's expression was solemn now. And Kylo thought it best to not poke the subject further, so as not to disturb the delicate balance of this slightly-civil conversation they were finally having. So what Rey said next, came as a complete surprise to him.

"I was born in Yorkshire, " the girl said, sighing, almost accepting ceasefire, eyes still staring out the window, "in an orphanage. Went to public school and then..." she paused, "a retired military couple adopted me on their tour to Yorkshire," something about the way she said it sounded a bit off to Kylo, but she continued, "Took me to the States. Enlisted me to the army at fifteen. And now, here we are," Rey gestured with her free hand to the shabby diner they were sitting in, a humorless smile on her face. Kylo considered this for a moment. And then replied.

"Why do you still have an English accent even though you've lived in America most of your life?"

Rey shrugged, "Don't know. I guess I just wanted them to know I'd never be one of them. Yorkshire was home. Even though it was an absolute pile of shit, it was home. And then someone took me from that home to be their piece of human ammo, an expendable pawn, to be their war dog. And I just..." Rey turned around to stare into Kylo's eyes with an almost angry glare, "I will _never_ be one of them."

Rey looked away, turning her eyes once again to the woman behind the counter, she was setting the dough that she molded into bagels on a steel tray. Rey watched her meticulously twist the dough around in her hand, carve patterns into it and set it neatly onto the tray in front of her. Rey could tell that the woman enjoyed her craft from the way she was humming softly to herself. Rey couldn't place the tune right away in her head but when the woman started to sing softly, she recognized the song immediately, even under the girl's strong German accent.

**_Just a perfect day_ **

**_Problems all left alone_**

From the far side of the diner, the two old men playing checkers or chess (Rey still wasn't sure) called out to the girl to sing louder. The girl curtsied with her apron and spun around, feeling the music in her head and began to sing.

**_Oh it's such a perfect day_ **

**_I'm glad I spent it with you_ **

Kylo and Rey looked at each other from across the table.

**_Oh, such a perfect day_ **

**_You just keep me hanging on..._**

The irony of the song was not lost to either of them, given their current situation. All it took was one look, and the two of them broke into uncontrollable maniacal laugher.

 

* * *

 

Hux and Finn came back nearly five hours after leaving Rey and Kylo in the diner, the look on their faces as solemn and serious as ever, only enhanced now by their shock at discovering Rey and Kylo in hysterical fits of laughter while a pretty, blonde girl sang behind the counter, evidently amused by the couple's reaction to her song.

"Did we... _break_ them?" Hux asked.

"Seems like it," Finn replied, making his way to their worn-out table, keys in hand.

The fifty mark Hux left on the table was still there, untouched. Hux walked to the table, fishing out a small key from the pocket of his pants and uncuffed Kylo from the chair. On the other side of the table, Finn did the same.

As soon as she was free from the confines of the handcuffs, Rey massaged her sore blistered wrist, lightly blowing on the skin that had been cut there. On the other hand, Kylo, surprisingly, seemed to have no evident blisters from being handcuffed to a metal chair for five hours. He raised his leg up on the table, the knife that Rey jammed into his calf was still there and wrapped his hands around the hilt, attempting to remove it. Instinctively, Rey stood up, trying to stop him from doing so, and Kylo moved back in his chair a little, anticipating an attack.

"I'm not going to hurt you, Kylo," Rey said, her next words and her concerned tone surprising even her, "You shouldn't do that! Leave the knife be, or else you'll bleed out by the time you get to a hospital."

The three men surrounding her gaped at her in shock.

"Oh," Kylo said, removing his hand from the hilt of the knife, and putting his leg back down on the ground, "You can't blame me for flinching, kiddo. This has been a very... _odd_ day. Too many developments, not enough processing time."

"I know what you mean," Finn added.

"Same." Hux said.

 

 

"Can you walk, Kylo?" Hux asked after a moment of awkward silence.

"What do _you_ think, you fucking idiot?" Kylo replied.

"I am your superior, Ren!" Hux bellowed, "you cannot speak to a Lieuten -"

"Yeah, yeah, whatever, shut up," Kylo interrupted, "Can you help me walk to the car then or not?"

Hux let out an exasperated angry sigh. "Fine," he said, through gritted teeth.

"Well, then, sorry to cut this short kid -" Kylo stood up, putting all his upper body weight on the weak table beneath him, that creaked in protest, "Finn will tell you the details of where we'll be heading to find Luke Skywalker and why, and I'll see you in three months in Moscow."

"What the fuck!? In Moscow?" Rey hissed, glaring at Hux now, instead of Kylo.

"You really need to get some anger management classes, kid," Kylo remarked at her sudden outburst, when suddenly the table gave one last defeated creak, and collapsed under the weight of Kylo's body. Hux caught him before he hit the ground but not before the wood splinters cut into his hand as he reached the ground to balance himself. Blood started oozing from the huge gash in Kylo's palm. Almost without thinking, Rey tore off the hem of her shirt and handed it to him, that he wrapped around his palm to stop the bleeding.

The blonde woman must have heard the commotion because the four of them could now hear her angry German swearing from behind the counter as she made her way towards their table, stomping her feet on the ground.

Finn recovered the fifty mark note from the wreckage of the table, the end of the note was cut, and the blood from Kylo's splintered hand that had dropped onto the piece of paper smudged and spread like ink on old parchment. The woman continued to shout at them at the top of her lungs and in a desperate attempt to appease the woman, Finn handed her the bloodied note in his hand.

"For the new table," he said, in German.

Still glaring, the woman accepted the bloodied fifty mark bill, with a stern, " _Danke_ ," and made her way back to her work station.

"So today was pretty eventful huh?" Kylo tried to joke, one of his arms hung over Hux's shoulders for support. "What do you say, kid? Truce?" He extended his splintered hand, now wrapped in the torn grey fabric of Rey's t-shirt.

"Fuck you," Rey said, taking Kylo's hand and shaking it, but the venom in her voice was gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Translation for the Russian words:  
> Suka: bitch  
> Ukh Ti: Oh Wow  
> Ty che,blyad, Hux?: What the fuck Hux?


	3. While My Guitar Gently Weeps

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The song for this chapter is the iconic Beatles song from their album "The Beatles". To anyone who hasn't heard it, please do now. It's fantastic.

**Yorkshire, October 1975**

"Oi! You there!"

"Shit!" Rey muttered, her half-lit cigarette falling from between her yellowing teeth onto the snow that covered the pavement. Squashing the struggling flicker of flame beneath the heel of her brown leather boot, she waved her arms around trying to dissipate the overwhelming smell of smoke, and dusted off the ash from her black uniform vest, trying to make her questionable conduct less apparent.

"What are you doing, Rey?" Behind her, the middle aged blonde woman, dressed in black nun's robes, yelled.

Rey, who was leaning against the door frame of what she thought to be the least-frequented exit in the school, quickly straightened her posture and turned around to face the woman, her aging face all scrunched up in a mildly frightening scowl.

"Oh, I was just out here for a little bit of fresh air, Sister Amelia!" Rey replied, putting on her best innocent smile on her face and trying to sound as confident as possible. "Miss Beatrice sent me to the nurse's office 'cause I told her I wasn't feelin' too well. On my way back, I thought a little bit of fresh air would do me good."

"So you weren't smoking then, is that it?" Sister Amelia spoke, sternly, in her thick Irish accent, waving her metallic cross in the girl's face.

Trying her best to look offended, she replied, "No, Sister Amelia - I would never - how could you even think of - I am appalled - that you would even - _Jaysus Christ_ , woman -"

"Don't you dare take the Lord's name in vain, young lady," the Sister scolded, "and isn't that ash I see on your collar, girl?"

Rey looked down, and indeed, the remnants of the white ash were still there (she must have missed it in her hurry) strikingly visible against the black collar of her uniform.

"Oh fuck me -"

"REY JAKKU! Didn't your parents ever teach you to -" the Sister started to scold and then immediately paused...regretting the words that came out of her mouth.

 _Now, I've got her_ , Rey thought.

"Nah, Miss," Rey spoke softly, raising her eyes to meet the woman's, "my parents never taught me anything... seeing as they all abandoned me when I was still a babe."

The Sister looked down, embarassed, lowering her cross from the girl's face and letting the chain thump back onto her black overalls. "That's still no way to speak to an adult, young lady," she said, the stern glare returning to her face. "This is the first and only time I'm going to let you go, you understand. Next time I see you smoking outside before, during or after school hours, there will be hell to pay, I assure you, miss."

"Thanks, Sister Amelia. I swear -"

Don't swear on petty things like this! It's a disrespect to God!"

"Right, I'm sorry, you're right. I promise I'll never do it again. Thank you so much, " Rey said, raising her arms to hug the new teacher and trying to kiss her cheek.

"Get off me, girl!" Sister Amelia said, pushing her off and rolling her eyes.

"I'll be going back to class now, Sister," Rey said, stepping aside, turning back to the abandoned corridor inside the building.  
"Yeah, you better be, young lady. I better not see you loitering around the halls. Or on the back stairs. Or in the rugby court!"

Rey let out a small giggle at the woman's comment and the successful execution of her plan and headed back to class.

The truth was, that Sister Amelia was a new addition to the Saint Eva Public Convent School for Girls and she was not as well-versed in the happenings of the school or the "criminal" records of the students as some of the older teachers, like Sister Maz Kanata, were. And since it was only the first time Rey had been caught by Sister Amelia, she had successfully gotten out of it using the "orphan" excuse. Granted it had worked on Sister Maz the first time as well, and she had let her go with a warning, yet she still had some suspicions about Rey, after finding her in the rugby court with a cigarette, during class hours. The second time she had discovered her... man, she would never forget what happened after that. She had gotten scolded so bad. And after that, Maz had given her detention for months, and on top of all that, made her join the school choir for the weekly church sermon. After that, Rey had tried her level best to steer clear of Old Maz in all circumstances. Rey knew if this had been Maz instead of Sister Amelia, she probably would have gotten expelled.

 _N_ _o, I probably wouldn't have_ , Rey thought to herself, considering her odds.

Although Rey was an orphan since as long as she could remember, she had also known two people nearly all her life. Maz Kanata and Lucas Bahnof.

All she knew about them were the mere basics. Maz was a teacher, and a nun. And Lucas was a teacher, and a priest. Both taught at the same Convent School Rey attended and Maz was also the head of that school alongwith the orphanage associated with it, located in the building adjacent to the school building. And Lucas ran the church, quite diligently Rey thought, located also in a building adjacent to the school building.  
All she knew about these two people were these little unimportant details about their current lives and that annoyed Rey terribly, for they shrouded who these people actually were in a cloud of mystery. Everytime she tried asking them anything about the kind of life they had lead before joining the school or the church or how they had found themselves the guardians of a little brown-haired, brown-eyed, smart-talking, trouble-making arrogant little gearhead, known as Rey Jakku, they wouldn't even give her the courtesy of lying to her. They would ignore her and ignore her until she got tired of their secrecy and decided to spin her own tales of what may have happened. Silly children's stories, of course, far fetched tales of princehood and stardom and adventure, all of which Maz and Lucas, her legal guardians, would listen to patiently and smile.

They never commented and they never answered her questions.

The details of her biological parents' identity or their death were never revealed to her, despite her incessant questioning over the years and neither was the truth of either Lucas's or Maz's previous identities.

Over the years there were only three details that she could gather about her guardians that she knew for a fact to be true.

1\. Lucas used to be the neighbour of her parents'.

2\. Maz and Lucas were lifelong friends who met through this man called Han.

3\. Lucas was born in Poland.

These three miniscule details frustrated Rey as much as they intrigued her. There was nothing she could draw from those three facts about the people that Maz and Lucas used to be. They certainly were not her State-appointed guardians, that much was clear. Why else would they shy away from answering her questions and never meet her eyes when she asked about her parents? Even as a young girl, she knew what that kind of secrecy meant, that guilt-ridden sorrowful look Lucas would give her whenever she asked about her biological parents. It meant, that they knew what had happened to Rey's parents, and probably had something to do with Rey being orphaned. But it was a reality that was too painful for Rey to admit to herself, and one that she would know to be true only too late.

While Rey's official residence was at the orphanage, Rey loved hanging around at the church far more than the boring girls dormitory filled with teeangers giggling about The Beatles and praying incessantly. Though, the only real difference between the church and the dormitory was that the church had instead, a middle aged white-haired man giggling about the Beatles and praying incessantly. Maz and Lucas had an arrangement on who would take care of "the little brat" (a phrase that in the church was usually a coded term of endearment from both Lucas and Maz) and they had both concluded that it would be best if Rey's official address remained with the orphanage and she kept her room there while spending the day wherever she pleased. Surprisingly to both of them, the place she most loved visiting was not the many clubs and hangouts her classmates used to attend but the daily lessons Lucas used to teach her.

Not lessons, no, that would not be the right word for them. Training, maybe, but whenever she had asked Lucas why he was training her, he had only shrugged off the question saying only, "There's a war going on, isn't there?"

"No there isnt!" Rey would reply in her childish innocence.

"There's a war going on everywhere, all the time, Rey. It would do you good to learn that early on. So you'll never be surprised or unprepared if someday that war reaches your doorstep."

Rey could never understand Lucas' answers. And most of Lucas' grim recollections used to completely fly over her head. But despite that, Lucas didn't give her much of a choice in the matter. She simply had to attend the lessons with Lucas. Despite Maz's vehement opposition, she had soon come around to see it as a necessary skill. And so it began.

The first lesson she ever had was on her tenth birthday, nearly five years ago. She still remembered it very clearly. It was a snowy October night. She had found Lucas and Maz arguing in his study at the church, while Rey looked on from behind the curtains. The old woman, a smoking pipe between her teeth, was shaking her head in refusal while at the window, Lucas had only sighed and said, "It has to be done, Maz. They'll come for us soon enough, and if they find her they'll use her too. Do you want to leave the girl completely helpless against Holdo? Or Snoke, for that matter?"

Rey remembered seeing Maz shiver slightly at the mention of those names, before muttering a defeated, "Fine," and marching out of the door.

That night Lucas had taken Rey out to the abandoned cricket pitch near the school. Nobody used to use it in the winters, seeing how every inch of it was covered in snow. He was holding something small and furry in his hand.

 _It's moving_ , Rey remembered thinking as Lucas knelt down in the snow and set down a tiny injured squirrel on the ground.

"A squirrel!" Rey had exclaimed, "Where did you find it, Lucas? Is it hurt?" Rey had always had a strong affection for all animals. Oftentimes she would bring a stray dog or cat home on her way back from the store or the school and beg Lucas to let her keep it, which he would always refuse.

"Go get some water from the spring for the poor little guy," Lucas had said to her, petting the soft animal. Rey ran to the spring water pump outside the field, but when she returned with a bucket of water in her hands, she saw the little squirrel lying dead in the field of snow and Lucas' bloodied hands holding the knife.

She had wailed and cried, "Why did you do it? Why did you do it?" she had said and hit Lucas in the chest many times, but Lucas only stood there, emotionless. When she had given up trying to hurt him he had looked down at the short little girl, bent down and said:

"You want to avenge the poor creature?"

"What?" Rey has said in a broken tired voice, wiping away her tears and snot on the arm of her black coat.

"If you want to avenge him, try and hit me."

"What?" She said again.

"Come on, girl, hit me!" It was in situations like this where you could really hear the Polish accent underneath the thick made-up Yorkshire one, "Hit me! If you cared about that poor little creature!"

Angry and determined, Rey had charged at him, trying her hardest to hit him, again and again. Yet he deflected, every time, sending Rey falling to the snow. By the time the night was over, there was more than one creature's blood in the snow on the field.

Rey had returned home that day, and after months of staying at the church she had decided to go to Maz's place again and had cried her heart out. Maz had held the little girl and treated the cuts on her face and put her to sleep.

She didn't speak to the old man for weeks, yet she fought him. Thrice a week, she would go to the pitch and fight him. Yet she could never beat him, not for three more months.  
Her first victory came as a surprise to both of them. Lucas was clearly distracted by something, and Rey had used it to her advantage and clocked him right in the jaw, a move that made him cough up blood on the snowy pitch. After hitting him a few times in the stomach, Lucas raised his hand in defeat. Rey gave him his hand and helped him stand up and dust off the dirt from his black pastor's robes.

After that, she had taken her childish revenge and Rey and Lucas went back to their usual friendly relationship they had before the incident. However, she never let herself forget it. The sight of blood and death dealt by her father-figure's hand, the color of it against the snow, or the way Lucas had urged her to fight back with that slightly desperate gleam in his eyes. Despite it, maybe due to some base instinct to survive, to belong, she truly loved Lucas, she was sure about that. Her earliest memories of being alive were just Lucas sitting on the altar at the empty church, while a little Rey clung to his leg, as he played The Beatles' "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" on his light brown acoustic guitar.

In her theories, Lucas was always a folk musician. How this man came to be a pastor for a small church in the middle of nowhere, was a question she would get the answer to only too late.

* * *

  
"You're late!" bellowed Lucas from his study when Rey entered through the back door, trying to keep as quiet as possible. _I swear that man has the ears of a hawk,_ Rey thought.

Putting down her bag, she saw Lucas flying in her direction with a punch directed at her. She didn't have long to react, quickly disassembling herself from the straps of her bag, she threw herself to one side of the hallway so that she would miss his assualt. He wheeled around quickly, but she caught his arm halfway and blocking it between her arm and the door, she turned him around and pinned the man to the door. He was quicker though, his foot stomping on Rey's and his leg kicking hers to make her lose her balance. He turned around swiftly to twist her arm and secure it at her back.

"Not bad, kid," Lucas said, "but you need to work on your surprise attack skills. No one announces to you they're going to attack you in a real fight!"

The door opened suddenly, finding itself blocked by the two bodies in front of it. It was Maz, as always. Rey could smell the scent of store bought cookies that she liked to bring on snowy aftermoons like this. Lucas let Rey go and she stood up brushing the snow and the dust from her uniform. The door swung open and Maz entered the hallway.

Maz was a peculiar woman. Older than Lucas by at least twenty years, and always with a smoking pipe between her teeth. There wasn't a single moment in her life where Rey hadn't seen Maz with her smoking pipe on her. Recently she had switched to cigarettes as a more convenient source of her tobacco, but her smoking pipe was inarguably her favorite possession in the world.

She didn't talk much, but when she did, she was full of wisdom. Though usually her facial expressions usually did the talking for her. Rey could easily tell what she was thinking by the way her big round glasses would lie on her nose, or by the way her forehead used to get all wrinkly when she was worried. She was a short woman, far shorter than Rey. Maybe it was just a perk of her age (though Rey would never dare say that to her face. She knew that Maz could easily kick her ass if she wanted to.) Rey remembered that she had once discovered a very old photograph of Lucas and Maz. Lucas looked the same, really. The white in his hair just beginning to show, and the wrinkles on his face evident because of years of worry and distress. But Maz looked quite beautiful. She had longer darker hair than her hair now, which was short and white. She didn't use to wear glasses. And even though, she was short, her height wasn't so short to be concerning. There was another couple standing next to them, a beautiful young woman with her brown hair tied up in elegant braids. She wore a white ankle-length gown. Next to her stood a tall handsome man, with dark blonde hair styled to perfection, wearing a red band on one of his arms. Other than the woman who she didn't recognize, the sense of style was the same for all three of them. Dark, military-style black winter coats, black scarves and heavy rifles slung over their shoulder. Rey read the description behind the photo that said:

" _Poland, Han and Leia's wedding, 1938_ "

When she had heard someone approaching the study, she had put the photograph back where she had found it almost immediately, shutting the desk drawrer with a thud and pretended never to have seen it. The next time she went looking for it, it was gone.

* * *

  
"I suppose you wouldn't have eaten dinner, you worthless slobs?" Maz inquired.

"It's not like you ever make any for us, you old hag!" Lucas shouted from his study.

"I bring you stuff from the store, isn't that enough?"

"It's always cold though!"

"And it's cheap too, so stop your complaining."

Rey could hear the sound of the chair dragging on the floor from the other room. Not again, she thought. But surely enough, she heard the static of the record player as Lucas played the same album for the millionth time. A sure enough way to annoy the hell out of Maz anytime.

It was the same album she'd been listening for ten years. The Beatles' 1968 album, uninspiringly called "The Beatles". Rey essentially knew every song on the album word by word at this point. And now the mere sound of the static of the record player as it played the album used to make Maz and Rey groan in annoyance.

 _How did this fanboy make pastor,_ Rey wondered.

"Rey could you get a hammer from the supply closet so I can crush his precious album to pieces?" Rey heard Maz call out from the other room.

"Sure thing!" Rey laughed in reply.

"Oh and Rey, my kitchen is running low on milk. There's five pounds on the counter. Could you bring a carton from the store?" Luke shouted.

"Okay."

"What was that?"

"I said, okay!" Rey shouted in return.  
Picking up her jacket from the hooks on the door and the money from the small table beside it, she left the small apartment, closing the door behind her and made her way to the store, passing the Church on her way.

* * *

  
When she returned, a carton of milk in one hand and box of gummy bears in the other, the sun had long since set. Snow decked every single inch of the little street she resided on. Taking long footsteps to avoid getting her boots sunk in the snow, she made her way back to the meager one bedroom apartment Lucas owned. When she arrived, bounding up the steps, to see the door half-open she froze.

 _Lucas? Maz?_ she tentatively called out through the opening.

She was about to swing the door open when she saw a man running towards her from the corner of her eye. Dropping the milk and the box of bears on the street pavement, she turned around to look at the tall man lunging at her from the left. She stopped his arm before it made contact with her jaw, realizing that it was clutching a large jagged dagger in its fist, realizing that the man's real target had been her throat

_The man isn't Lucas._

_Oh my God._

_What is happening?_

She didn't have long to think before the man's next attack. With his other hand, he tried to punch her in the stomach, but she expertly deflected the shot, and without losing the grip on his arm, kicked the man right in the groin with her left knee. The man lost his balance and fell forward, losing his grip on the knife, dropping it in the snow. Before he could regain composure, Rey punched him straight in the jaw once, and then again, and then again until the man spit out blood and collapsed in the snow.

_What the bloody hell is happening?!_

Picking up the knife, she stepped over the unconscious man and went inside the apartment. The milk carton she had dropped earlier had split open from the blow of the fall and now there was milk on the steps everywhere. Rey had only stepped one foot inside the apartment when alarms began to go off in the whole house.

 _What the fuck!?_ This has never happened before.

 _Lucas must have set up these alarms in case of an emergency_ , she thought. _Where are you, old man?_

_If Lucas was still inside, he would never have let a skinny thug like this guy come within ten feet of this house. Which means, he's not here. I need to find him._

Dismounting the steps, while the sharp alarm still rang in her ears, a blaring warning to run, run, run, she ran in the opposite direction of where she came from, sprinting as fast as she could to the pitch. Lucas will be there, he'll know what to do.

She had barely crossed the street, when she felt something prick into her back followed by an electric shock tearing through her body, as if she'd been hit with a thousand cricket bats all at once, her vision blurred before her eyes and she collapsed onto the damp dirty snow.

* * *

  
The first thing she heard when she regained consciousness was the faint plucking of a guitar somewhere nearby. Opening her eyes, she found herself in Lucas' study, the record player playing the same album it had been when she had left. She tried to get up from the wooden chair, but she found her hands tied behind her back.

What the...?

"I'm glad you're finally awake," she heard a woman say. American, is the first thing Rey registered about her voice. And not just American, posh American. Probably from the capital.

Rey turned around to look at the woman standing in the doorway, though it was hard considering the bindings on her arms. The woman came closer to her and turned her chair around to face her.

There were many things that stood out about the woman's appearance. But most striking was the full head of cotton-candy pink hair she had. She wasn't that old, probably late-thirties, Rey guessed. She had a tall lean frame. She wore a long brown trench coat and kept her hair loose which framed her face perfectly. Her sharp cat-like features bore into Rey's plain face, the expression on her face one of absolute contempt and disgust.

The track on the record player changed as Rey asked her first question. The grim depressing notes of the piano greeting an equally grim depressing conversation.

"What do you want? Where's -" Rey started, stopping herself mid-sentence so as not to reveal Lucas' identity.

"Where's Lucas?" the woman asked, and Rey's eyes widened in horror. _Please God, let him be okay._

"How do you know Lucas?" Rey asked, aggressively, "Did your goons try and beat him up too?"

"Well, for starters, his name is not Lucas actually," the woman continued, "He's actually Luke Skywalker." She paused for effect, "Former CIA intelligence agent, for the Soviet Union."

Years of theorizing who Maz and Lucas used to be, Rey had, of course, also considered the possibility of one, or both, of them being secret agents. It would have certainly fit their secretive nature. So Rey wasn't really all that surprised that Lucas -Luke- used an alias (and not a very convincing one at that). After she saw the photograph in Lucas' desk drawer, she'd been convinced that Lucas and Maz must have led some very dangerous lives back in the day. She didn't have long to let this information sink in before the woman changed tactics.

"Rey, do you know anything about your parents?" the woman said.

"How do you know my name?" Rey murmured, staring definitely up at the woman.

"Answer the question, Rey."

"I'm not telling you anything,"

The woman sighed, "Well, let me just inform you then. Out of common courtesy."

"Lady, I don't give a fuck whether they're alive or dead. They abandoned me and that's all there is to it."

"Ah, but that's where you're wrong, honey..."  
Seeing the wide-eyed expression on the girl's face, the woman smiled. Taking out a brown paper file from her coat pocket, she laid it on the table beside Rey.

Turning the leaf over, the woman took out a variety of black and white and colored photos from the folder. She set a single black and white photo on the table beside Rey and turned her chair a bit so that she could see it clearly.

A man and a woman, the man in his thirties and the woman probably in her early twenties, holding a small two or three year old baby.

The baby had dark brown hair and dark brown eyes, fat cheeks and a beaming smiling face, all the features that the people in Rey's life always described her with.  
_That's me_ , Rey thought, her eyes widening in realization.

The woman holding the child also had brown hair but strikingly blue almond-shaped eyes. In physical appearance, the baby looked far more like the man standing next to the woman. His face was grim and un-smiling but he shared most of the features with his daughter. Brown hair, brown eyes, a round face and big bulging eyes.

"Tessa and Matthew Jakku," the woman said, "Married in Summer 1957." She placed the document with the couple's faces on it in front of Rey. Rey examined the document, skimming past the sections that listed their occupations as Store Owner and Mechanic respectively, reading her own name "Rey Jakku" written in blocky type-writer font under the "Issue" section.

"So what? Telling me who my parents were changes nothing. They still abandoned me," Rey said, lowering her eyes and looking away from the woman.

"If only that were true," she said, rummaging through the file to take out another black and white image. This one seemed like a photograph from a security camera. The lines were all grainy and the colors were distorted but the faces were just the same.  
A younger, more slender-looking version of the man she knew -and loved- as Lucas held a tiny wailing baby in his arms, a baby that looked an awful lot like Rey, with her chubby cheeks and characteristic brown hair. Behind him, beaten and bloody, lay the bodies of two people, a man and a woman -

 _"No."_ Rey's eyes went wide.

"No. No. It can't be," Rey said, tears falling down her cheeks. "It can't be!" Struggling against the binds against her wrists, the friction of the ropes burning the sensitive flesh there, she broke free from her restraints and lunged at the defenseless woman, shreiking and, shouting, "You're lying! You're lying!" Both of them fell down on the floor and Rey landed a strong punch to the woman's face.

"You made this up, you bitch!" Rey screamed, "You little CIA whore! You and your band of fucking liars made this up!" Screaming and crying, she hit the woman, again and again, "You lying cunt!" She screamed.

She didn't notice it when two strong manly arms took hold of the wailing struggling child. "Let me go!" She screamed, biting the hands that kept her in place, "Let me go!" She screamed again.

The woman stood up. "Haven't you ever wondered how Lucas found you? Haven't you ever asked yourself why he kept so many secrets from you?" Picking up the photo on the table, she shoved it in Rey's face, "This is why, you stupid girl! He took custody of you only because he felt guilty for killing your loving Mama and Papa. He killed them!"

"No, no," Rey shook her head, a stream of tears falling uncontrollably down her cheeks.

"You've always known it to be true, haven't you?" The woman said, wiping the blood off her face, "You have always known that Luke was a murderer! You've just been deceiving yourself, girl!"

Rey still kept shrieking and fighting and trying to get out of the strong grasp that held her in place.

"Take her away, " the woman nodded to the men holding her. Picking her up from, both arms, they exited the study that used to be Lucas' ....and that's when she saw it.  
In the corner of the hallway, lay the bloodied round glasses, next to a small frail lifeless body, its arms splattered with blood and the hand clutching an old worn out smoking pipe.

Maz.

That's when Rey really lost it.

Thrashing and biting and struggling against the strong grip on her arms, she resisted. One of the men suddenly let her go and Rey kicked him in the groin and broke the glass flower vase sitting on the table in the hallway on his head. The man's head oozed blood and he collapsed onto the broken shards on glass. The other man tried to contain her, but she stomped on his foot with all the force she could muster and turned around to land a hard blow to his side with her leg.  
In her fury, she didn't notice the sharp sting in her neck until her vision started to blur, her eyes lost focus and she felt herself slowly descending towards the floor.

"Should I kill her?" "No, she might be useful to us." "Yes, she's the only one who knows Skywalker..." She heard people's muddled voices whisper.

The last thing she saw before she lost consciousness was the reflection of her animalistic savage face, red with anger and blood (her own and her enemies'), in Maz's round glasses.

A tear ran down her cheek, as she defeatedly closed her eyes, a soft familiar voice singing in her ear:

_**"I don't know how**_

_**someone controlled you** _

_**They bought and sold you.**_

_**Still my guitar gently weeps."** _

In her dreams, it was still Lucas's voice that sang to her, with his funny accent and his novice guitar playing skills, Maz looking on disapprovingly from her place on the steps, as Rey was lulled to sleep.

 


	4. Kalinka

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (Based on the famous Russian folk song, Kalinka. Anyone who is Russian, or lives in Moscow, please tell me if I used the Russian dialogue correctly, and if the places I mention are aptly described.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guess who's back? Back again?  
> It's me!  
> Been a long time, but I have basically been taking exam after exam for two months now, so the time for writing was sparse. But I just got free last week, and wrote this as quickly as possible. And it's the longest thing I've written yet. Please, enjoy and do leave feedback and comments.  
> Translation for Russian words and phrases at the end.

** Moscow, February 1953 **

“Stand still, will you, kid?”

“I’m not a kid anymore, Dad!”

Han chuckled loudly and the boy scowled, annoyed, when his father placed his hands on either side of the little boy’s shoulders to steady him. Turning around, Han picked up the fine-toothed comb from the wooden dressing table behind him, in one hand, and hair gel in the other. Twisting the metal lid of the jar open, he took out some gel with his fingers and rubbed it into the boy’s hair, pushing it back with the comb.

“Hey, for this old man, you’ll always be a kid… kid,” Han said, moving from his place leaning against the dressing table, so that the boy could look at his own reflection in the mirror.

“So. What do you think, Ben?” the man questioned.

The boy assessed his appearance, his dark black hair, slick with hair gel, was combed and pushed back, all nice and proper. It wasn’t his style really, he much preferred his hair down and floppy like his father’s, but he supposed that for tonight’s event, a fancy hairstyle like this was obligatory.

“It’s alright,” Ben shrugged his shoulders, “Not really my style.”

Han chuckled again, “Six-year olds don’t have style, kid.”

“According to Mom, I have more than you.”

“Hey!” Han protested, trying to poke the boy in the stomach, but Ben dodged the attack, laughing at his father’s mock disapproval, “Don’t sass-mouth your old man!”

“You’re not that old, Dad…” Ben said, with a boyish laugh.

“Yeah, well, my sense of style definitely doesn’t betray my age, that’s for sure.”

“Hmm… I really wouldn’t go that far…”

“Hey! I taught you everything you know so don’t you start…”

Han turned to the mirror, checking his own hair, which was the same as Ben’s, combed and slicked back, for the occasion. He wore his usual olive uniform, with the black belt and boots, and the red collar, his service medals and ribbons pinned in neat rows to his left chest, except that today he wore the more formal epaulettes on his shoulder, the red and gold stripes behind three silver stars, indicating his rank, of Colonel of the Soviet Union.

“You’re not really… _that_ old… are you? … Dad?” Ben said behind him, in a meek worried voice.

Han laughed again, amused by his son’s worrying, turned around, and smiled at the boy.

“Much closer to death than you are, my boy!” he chuckled, and then raised both hands to his heart in a poor imitation of being shot, closed his eyes, hung his head and fake-fell to the floor, pretending to be dead.

“Hey!” the boy protested, kneeling beside him, “That’s not funny,” he said shaking his arm, “At all!”

Han opened one eye, and said, “What? You worried about me?”

“…...No….” Ben replied, still shaking his father’s arm in an attempt to make the older man stop his theatrical antics. He tried to hide the concern and embarrassment on his face, the poor boy, but Han wasn’t going to let him go that easily.

“Well, okay then!” said Han, closing his eyes again, and sticking his tongue out pretending to be dead.

“I mean it! Stop!” the boy said, having stopped shaking his father’s arm and opting to scowl at him from atop the dressing table.

Han opened an eye tentatively, seeing the boy perched up on the small table, looking away from him, a frown on his face. He raised both arms to his chest again, as if defending an attack or clawing out a bullet, got up slowly, and quite dramatically, then pointed towards a few invisible enemies, and with a deep gruffy voice said, “They will not get me this time, _comrade_!”

Looking at the boy from the corner of his eye, his arms still raised pointing towards nothing, to see how well his performance was received, he found the boy still looking away, scowling. _The boy really got that from his mother, eh?_ He thought to himself before letting his arms fall to his sides, and slowly approaching the six-year old perched up on the table.

“What’s wrong, kiddo?” Han said, using the most parental-sounding voice he could manage, but the boy refused to look at him.

Han sighed, and stooped down so that he was at eye level with the boy, “I didn’t mean to scare you, Ben… were you worried?”

Reluctantly, the boy nodded, still looking away.

“Oh, kiddo, it was just a joke,” Han tried to reason with him, embracing the child and scooping him up into his arms. The boy hid his face in his father’s jacket and mumbled something.

“What was that, Ben? Did you say something?”

Raising his head slightly from his father’s jacket, Ben spoke louder, “I don’t want you to die, Daddy,” he said, in a concerned voice, then buried his head back into his father’s shoulder.

“I’m not dying anytime soon, kiddo… you won’t be getting rid of me that easy,” Han said, in a kind gentle voice, kissing the top of Ben’s head.

“Promise?” came a timid voice from his shoulder.

Han sighed, hugging the boy closer, and said, “Let’s go, kiddo. We’re going to be late.”

That, should’ve been Ben’s first hint.

 

* * *

 

Two hours later, Han was still imploring Ben to keep still, while he tried to tie a Windsor knot with the tie around Ben’s raised collar, which was proving to be a much more difficult task than Han had anticipated, with Ben being such a fidgety child. Even against all his struggles, Han had somehow managed to get the boy into his white dress shirt and black pants and had already restyled his hair three times (because he kept managing to ruin it somehow) and this was only the second to last task before they could finally leave.

“Where are we going, anyway?” Ben asked, now playing with his fingers, trying to pop a sound from his knuckles.

Han left the tie, for nearly the tenth time, took hold of both of the boy’s arms and held them to his sides. “Now keep them there,” Han said, annoyed, “This is only going to take a minute.”

“You’ve been saying that for the last half hour!” Ben replied, rolling his eyes.

“Well, that’s because you won’t stop moving!”

“No… It’s because you can’t tie a tie!”

“Yeah, yeah, whatever, shut up, kid…”

“Hey!” the boy exclaimed, offended, “Mom said no cursing!”

“Well, Mom’s not here so, what she doesn’t know won’t hurt her… besides, “shut up” isn’t a bad word…”

“Yes, it is! Mom said that it is!”

“Well, it’s just us guys today so you can curse too if you want.”

“What? No! Mom would kill me… where _is_ Mom, anyway?”

“Why are you so talkative today?”

“You have a problem when I’m talkative. You have a problem when I’m not talkative. What _do_ you want, old man?”

“To have a son that isn’t disrespecting me all the time, for one!” Han snapped at him.  Ben opened his mouth to say something but then feeling like he really did upset his father this time, just lowered his head, guiltily, making Han regret the words that came out of his mouth. _Kids_ , he thought to himself, shaking his head.

“I’m sorry.” Han said softly, and the boy looked up, “I shouldn’t have snapped… it’s just that Mom and I…aren’t… at the best of terms right now…”

“Did you two have a fight?” Ben asked.

“Sort of.” Han replied, busying himself again with the strands of his son’s tie.

“What was it about this time?”

“Nothing, sweetheart,” he looked up and smiled at the child, but Ben couldn’t help but notice how it didn’t really reach his eyes at all, giving him a sadder, more apologetic look than he was hoping for. He sighed and then went back to the tie, “Nothing you need to worry about, _moy khoroshyi_.”

“Where is she now?”

“Well… She got a call this morning. I think, Director Andreyev called all the cellists and pianists in, to make a recording for the General Secretary. So, she probably headed to Radio Moscow first thing in the morning. She was… vague. About it.”

“Okay…” the boy nodded, understanding, “That means she won’t be coming with us today?”

“Probably not. Your mother’s a busy woman, kid, you know that, and the best pianist in Moscow at the moment. So, I guess, it’ll just be you and me, today, eh?”

Han pulled the final strand down and it took the shape of an elegant knot. He let out a breathy exhale, in victory, and exclaimed, “Ta-da!” before straightening Ben’s collar and helping him put on his black jacket.

“Where are we going, anyway?’

“The Russian Army Theatre,” Han answered, kneeling down to help Ben put on his shoes.

“Why?”

“For a concert.”

“Who’s playing?”

“The Red Army Choir,” Han told him, matter-of-factly.

“The Army has a choir?”

Han sighed, “Yes, Ben. The Army do have a choir. Yes, we’re going to see them tonight. No, I don’t know what they’ll be playing. And no, I can’t get their autographs for you,” he replied foreseeing Ben’s next few questions. The shoes were on now, and Han was busy tying the shoelaces.

“…. That wasn’t even what I was going to ask.” Ben said, mostly to himself.

“What was that?” Han asked from below, done with the left shoe and now moving on to the right.

“Oh, nothing…” he paused, then asked, “I was just wondering if you have seen them perform before…?”

Han finished tying up the shoelaces, set the boy’s foot back on the floor, stood up and smiled, “Yes, as a matter of fact I have.”

Ben wasn’t expecting this answer. “Really? Wow. How was it? Where did you see it? Was Mom with you? When did -”

“Oh, wait, wait.” Han held up his hand and went to the adjacent room. Ben could hear his father rummaging through some drawers and shuffling some things in the other room, while he kept seated at the small stool in the main drawing room of their house. He heard Han exclaim and he must have found what he was looking for because he came back with a triumphant smile on his face, having successfully completed all his tasks for the day _and_ managed to make his somewhat disorganized son look presentable, one hand tucked into the pockets of his pants, and the other holding his olive-colored service hat, with its red lining, black visor, two-headed eagle emblem on the top and in the center, a big gold Soviet Star.

Ben opened his mouth to speak but Han anticipating the boy’s stream of questions about the choir they were just going to see, he raised his hand up again, “Hold up, I’ll answer all your questions in the car, alright, Ben?”

Han picked up his long military coat from the hook on the wall, and sliding his arm through one of the sleeves, motioned for Ben to get up and unlock the front door. The boy nodded, understanding his father’s gesture and made his way down the hallway to the front door, unbolting the bolts at the bottom and middle of the door, but not quiet being able to reach the top one. Han, with his coat now on, entered the hallway and seeing the boy’s futile efforts to reach the top bolt smiled to himself, and unbolted it. Resisting the urge to ruffle Ben’s hair, which had been coated with quite some hair gel by now that it almost looked fake, he took his son by the hand and opened the door.

“Let’s go, _Benushka._ ” Han said, holding the boy’s hand and walking out into the snow.

* * *

 

The car ride to the theatre took them three long hours. And although Han expected Ben to fall asleep halfway through the trip, the boy’s curiosity was endless. And what started as a simple review of the same choir they were going to see perform, soon turned into a story-telling session where Han recollected tales of his days in the war, something Han was not known to do, and the little boy could not have been more engrossed in his father’s tales.

“So, Dad. You were going to tell me about the concert you saw the Army Choir perform at…” Ben said, as soon as the car was out of the driveway.

Han chuckled lightly, “You don’t let things go, do you?”

“Nope, never,” the boy said enthusiastically, baring all his teeth in a wide grin. A few of his front teeth were missing, and he looked just so funny with his big smile and the optimistic look on his face, Han couldn’t help but laugh out loud.

“Alright, kiddo. I’ll tell you.”

Ben turned around completely in the passenger seat to face his father, as Han turned the car around a corner and onto the main road, the look in the child’s eyes, beckoning his father to continue.

“I saw the Red Army Choir… in 1948. At the end of the last war.”

“In Moscow?”

“No, not in Moscow. In Berlin.”

“Berlin? Where’s that?”

“It’s in Germany. It’s a country right next to Poland. You know Poland, right? It’s where your mother’s from.”

Ben nodded his head and Han continued.

“Well, you see _, moy khoroshyi_ , the end of the war was a dark time for the world. A lot of people had fought and a lot of people had lost. Not just their lives, but their homes, their families…” Han glanced at Ben, who was looking at him with a very solemn expression now.

“So, in 1948, when the war finally came to an end, I found myself in the middle of Berlin -”

“Was Mom with you?”

“No, kiddo, Mom wasn’t with me. She was here with you,” Han reached out and patted the boy on the head. “Besides, she still worked for General Stalin at the time, so her accompanying me wasn’t really an option, even if I had asked… But that’s beside the point. Who I did find myself in Berlin with, however, was your Uncle. Luke.”

“I have an Uncle?”

“He’s Leia’s brother, not mine. We don’t see him that often anymore. I haven’t seen him since the concert, in fact.”

“Why not?”

“Oh, you know, busy people, busy lives…” he said, in what even a six-year-old could identify as a plain old white lie, though Ben said nothing. Han continued, “So when the war ended, Luke and I were in the same city. And the Russian officials decided they would hold a concert, you know, to boost the _morale_ and everything…” he said, more than a hint of sarcasm in his voice, “It was a fantastic concert though. They had to pick Russian performers for it since it was being held in the Russian part of Berlin, and the _Alexandrov_ Ensemble, as they were called then, The Red Army Choir now, were selected. I remember it very well, yes. They set up a huge stage,” Han gestured with his hand, one still on the steering wheel, “right in the middle of the square. The Germans and the Russians worked for weeks, setting up the stage, practicing their performances, making everything look as beautiful as possible. And I have to admit, the effort really did pay off. It was beautiful.” Han finished, his expression nostalgic.

“How many people came to see?”

“Um….” Han pondered the boy’s question. “Around thirty, maybe forty thousand.”

“That many people! Wow….” The boy exclaimed, and Han laughed, doubtful that the child could even count that high yet.

“What songs did they perform?” Ben asked.

“Well. The longest and by far, the best performance was by a man named Viktor Nikitin. He sang a song called _Kalinka_. With the entire choir. But it was _his_ voice that truly shined. It wasn’t the first time I heard that song. Your mother absolutely loves it and she was the one who played it to me the first time. Her version is still the best, but Nikitin’s sure as hell – I mean, sure does come close.” Han said, when the boy passed him a disapprovingly look, “It was just so, so beautiful.” Ben noticed that his father had a certain twinkle in his eye when he spoke of the concert and the song, a look he had not seen on his father’s face for a very long time, “There were three rows of soldiers and a ton of instruments – guitars, trumpets, flutes, cellos, clarinets, cymbals -” Han stopped, seeing that the full inventory of instruments was losing the boy’s interest, “And they were _so_ loud. The music – it was vibrating through our very bones, it felt- It felt like it was physically instilling a new life in the German and Russian people.  It’s one of those things that happen only once in a person’s life, that sense of connection with something bigger than you. I hope you find something like that in your life too, kiddo,” he finished, the memory of a dozen accordions playing cheerfully in perfect harmony and the sound of a crowd of thousands of people clapping every time the tempo got faster, and faster, ringing in his ears.

He glanced at the child, who was now looking at him like he was the ultimate source of all wisdom in the world. Han couldn’t help but laugh, leaving the boy more confused than he already was.

“People from all over Germany came to see them,” Han continued, “But now? They’ve put up a big f-,” he stopped himself, eyes still on the road, “a big wall cutting right across the heart of Berlin, and people are… They’re just so trapped. We could never hold a concert like that again. Not in Berlin anyway. And if they held it in Moscow, no one would really show up, because of the cold,” Han sighed again, a quiet sadness enveloping the conversation.

“I do hope they play Kalinka today at the theatre,” Ben remarked.

“I hope so too, _solnyshko_ , it’s a truly magnificent song.”

“Tell me more about Uncle Luke,” said Ben after a minute or two of silence.

“What would you like to know?”

“Um…” the boy considered his father’s question, “Why was he in Berlin?”

“The same reason we all were there, because of the war.”

“Okay… so that means he was a soldier just like you, Dad?”

“No… he wasn’t a Russian soldier…”

 “A Polish soldier, then?”

 _Hmph. If only Ben knew the cruel joke he had just made_ , Han thought. _Poland? And soldiers?_ He almost wanted to scoff at the idea, and he would have if that reality hadn’t been so, so cruel.

“No. He wasn’t a soldier. Period.”

“A pianist like Mama, then?”

 _Luke couldn’t play ‘happy birthday’ on the piano even if he was forced to at gunpoint, the unskilled bastard_ , Han thought, chuckling lightly to himself. “No,” he replied to Ben’s question.

“What, then?”

“It’s complicated, kiddo. You don’t want to know!” Han said, trying to laugh off the boy’s questions.

“Oh… okay…” Ben looked down, and fiddled with his thumbs “Do you know where he lives?”

“Honestly, that man is a mystery to me. I’d say he kind of, lives all over the place,” Han said, gesturing vaguely at nothing.

“Well, if you’re not going to tell me anything, will you at least tell me what he was like?” Ben mumbled.

“Sure, bud,” Han said, turning around another corner to a different road. “Luke is… he… well, for starters, he has blonde hair, and blue eyes, unlike your mother, even though she tells me they were twins.”

“They were twins?”

“Yup. Your mom has a twin. They both grew up in Poland, and I only met him in 1937 when I went to visit Poland myself, so there’s not a lot I know about his early life. You could probably ask Leia if you want. But in all the time I’ve known him, he is…. a very kind person. A heart of gold, that man has. Very loyal. A great friend. He’s saved me on so many occasions…. I truly owe him my life.”

Ben listened to Han intently, as if Han was telling him of some great famous legend, awe and wonder in his eyes and a strong desire to meet this man Han was describing. “I really wish we can see him sometime, _Benushka_ , I really do…. I think I might have a picture of him at home too. I might show it to you when we get back, okay, bud?”

“Yeah!” Ben exclaimed enthusiastically, and Han laughed at his son’s innocence.

Three hours went by at the speed of light, with Han’s deep voice retelling old tales, and Ben staring at him with his wide-eyed gaze, his expression conveying his new-found love for his father and his awe and wonder towards the man he was describing, his uncle, whom he had never met.

* * *

 

By the time Han and Ben arrived at the theatre, it was almost dark. Han glanced towards his watch. _5.30 pm_ , the hour and minute hand read. It was still a full forty-five minutes before the concert officially began, yet there were still barely any cars in the parking lot. _The most important people usually come at the last minute to these kind of events_ , Han thought, _not so unusual_. In fact, he was kind of glad that only a few people had shown up yet. Han didn’t often get to spend such quality time with his son, and with every tooth he lost and every millimeter he grew, Han became more and more worried that he would regret not having spent more time with him, when he’s older. So, he was happy that none of the other Colonels or the Lieutenants had arrived yet. This way he could show Ben the complete interior of the theatre, without the usual military bullshit distracting him.

The Russian Army Theatre was a grand white building, with grand white steps, and tall grand pillars, and if someone was to look at the building from the sky, they would find themselves in awe of the grand white Soviet Star that the building was shaped as.

As soon he stepped out of the car, straightening his black jacket more elegantly than any six-year old should know how to, Ben was taken with the building, even though you couldn’t quite see the _grandness_ at this hour of the evening as you could in the light of day.

“You know who built this theatre?” Han asked Ben, who was still staring at the building with this dumbfounded bewildered expression on his face; Han couldn’t help but smile at him.

“No. Who?” replied the boy.

“The Great _Grand_ Premier Stalin.”

Ben didn’t understand why Han laughed so loudly after that.

* * *

 

The inside of the theatre was as beautiful as the outside, and Ben could not stop running around all over the place, from one pillar to the next, excitedly telling his father just how _beautiful_ everything was.

“Look, Dad,” he said, pointing towards the marble floors, with its intricate designs of concentric circles and pointed flowers. The space between the circles was filled with a mosaic of multicolored tile pieces, melded together in a kaleidoscopic rush of color. That, paired with the pure white pillars, created a fantastic blend of vivid color and elegance. Even though Han had already been here before, he had to admit, it was truly gorgeous, and despite how Stalin-esque the whole building looked, he had to marvel at its sculptor’s talent. He wondered why he didn’t notice the beautiful designs on the floor before. _Probably because there was nobody to point it out_ , he thought to himself.

A red-carpeted grand staircase indicated the direction of the main hall. Han helped Ben climb the stairs to the auditorium (and there were a lot of them) slowly, Ben’s little legs barely tall enough to climb the giant steps.

If Ben wasn’t awe-struck already, he sure as hell was now, as he walked through the giant gates to the auditorium. Rows and rows and rows of seats, were on either side of him, in neatly arranged aisles, each of which had their own giant doors to walk through.  Below him, beyond the railing, were more seats, thousands of them, all directed toward the stage which was a masterpiece all on its own.

“Wanna know something cool, kiddo?” his father said behind him, breaking the boy out of his trance.

Ben turned around, nodding his head.

“The last time I was here, they brought actual live canons and tanks on the stage! Tanks! And the stage didn’t even budge! Maybe if you’re lucky, they’ll bring one out today as well!”

“Really? Wow… I sure hope they do!” Ben’s eyes widened, and he smiled his toothless grin again, and Han found the boy’s expression just so _damn_ cute, he picked him up, surprising the boy, and hoisted him up on his shoulders, so that he could get a better panoramic view of the auditorium.

* * *

 

Ben and Han had fifteen minutes to explore the place from top to bottom, which was more than enough time, before members of the choir showed up for their final preparations, kicked them out and closed the doors, only to be opened five minutes before the performance began.

By this time, other members of the military had also shown up, starting with Marshalls of artillery and aviation and then the Junior Lieutenants and so on… all the way up to the food chain, to the General of the Soviet Army.

The Warrant Officers who were the first to arrive, second only to Colonel Han himself, seemed honestly quite shocked to see the Colonel there before any of them, and that look of surprise from his juniors was something he was going to cherish. _Thought you were all gonna get a drink and steal some Vodka before the real bosses showed up, didn’t you, you bastards? Damn near pissed yourselves at the sight of a Colonel, didn’t you?_ Han laughed to himself, at the men’s worried glances to each other. He would later describe the incident to Leia in much flowerier words.

Soon the first floor of the theatre was jam-packed with military men (and a few women, quite a rarity at these kinds of testosterone-fueled events) of all ranks and stations. Everyone from the Corporal of an engineering department, to the right hand of the fucking Premier, was invited. Any military man or woman in Moscow or within a thirty-kilometer radius of it, had been invited.

A man wearing the same olive colored uniform as the rest of the attendees, probably the spokesperson for the choir, soon announced to the hall that the concert would begin in nearly five minutes, instructing them all to kindly take their seats in the most orderly fashion.

Orderly fashion, however, was not a word one would find a particular abundance of at a military occasion, and especially not within a Russian one, as Han would soon find out.

* * *

 

The conductor raised up both his arms, baton in hand, and the shrill crisp sound of the opening violins cut through strings of pin-drop silence in the barely-lit hall, as if the singers and the instruments were all taking a deep breath of air before the song began. The conductor pointed towards the three rows of men behind the instruments, and the hall was soon filled with a deep, loud rumble, the first syllable of the word, “ _Kalinka_ ” extended over a few seconds. The bass drum soon joined in, and at the hit of the first tambourine, the choir abruptly stopped, as the singers moved down a pitch for the second syllable. Pause. “ _Kalinka_.” Pause. “ _Kalinka, Kalinka, moya.”_

The crowd erupted in cheers, clapping as the tempo rose with every single word. The whole choir had joined in now, the violins, the cellos, the tambourines, the drums, the cymbals, the guitars and the accordions, all perfectly harmonizing and slowly rising in tempo and speed, with every clap from the audience and every swish of the conductor’s baton. “ _V sadu yagoda malinka, malinka moya!_ ” the lyrics went, and Han saw Ben clapping along to them. A man hit a gong loudly, and the conductor’s hands signaled the stop and all the instrument came to a halt, feeling like an out of control car headed for a collision, stopping mid-impact, to float in space. Ben held his breath.

The resounding vocals of the soloist didn’t let the audience feel dejected for too long, as they echoed through the hall and brought the song head-first into its second stanza, accompanied by the soft sound of the violin, a complete contradiction to the action-packed beginning of the song.

Han glanced at his son, who was staring at the performers with awe and wonder.

**Oh, how quickly things can change.**

Han felt strong arms pulling him up from his seat violently, a hand wrapping around his neck, knocking the breath from him, two pistols digging into his back. Ben tore his eyes away from the stage to look at his father, surrounded now by at least a dozen men, and another one coming up behind Ben to wrap a hand around his mouth to stop the child before he could shout for help.

“Search him,” Han heard one of the voices say in the dark. A hand pulled off Han’s jacket off his shoulders, removing the revolver he had tucked into his pants, while another removed his knives from his boots.

“Dad, who are these people? What is happening?” Han heard Ben’s frightened little voice ask, the fear in his innocent eyes crushing his father’s heart.

“It’s going to be alright, _Benushka_ , just do as the men say,” Han tried to say as calmly as possible, hearing only the child’s scared whimpers in answer.

“Let’s go,” another voice said, different from the last time, and Han was pushed to move in the direction his assailants indicated, out the main door, and down the steps to the entrance hall. Han could hear the timid child-like footsteps among the sounds of heavy boots stomping the marble floor; they were taking Ben along too.

Once they reached the bottom floor, still flooded in light from its multi-colored chandeliers, Han could finally properly see the men who had apprehended him. Long black buttoned-up coats with fur collars with royal blue piping, grey _ushankas_ with the ear flaps tied up at the top, and the shoulder boards that read, “GB”-

“What’s the fucking KGB doing here? You people aren’t supposed to be invit-” Han said, his voice slightly out of breath.

“Shut up, you Nazi scum,” one of the men said, spitting on the ground in front of Han.

  
“What? What are you talking about?” Han demanded, his arms now being handcuffed to his back.

“You’re Colonel Han Solo, yes?” another man asked him.

“Yes?”

“You’ve been found guilty of colluding with the Nazi General Wilhuff Tarkin and selling top-secret Russian intel to the Nazi regime during the period of 1938 to 1944 and since 1944 you been in contact with the American spy, Luke Skywalker, and have been devising a plan to assassinate the General Secretary and Premier Joseph Stalin. What have you to say against these charges?”

“What? What is this nonsense? Who has put you up to this? I have never, _never_ , once in my life met General Tarkin. In fact, the unit under my command during the siege of Berlin was responsible for hanging the bastard in 1945!”

“Yes, we are aware,” said the same man, “which is why we have listed your area of collusion as 1938 to 1944.”

“I wasn’t even in Russia in 1938! Or Berlin, for that matter! I was in Poland! With my wife! We got married in 1938, for fuck’s sake!”

“Yes, we are aware,” the man said again, “Your wife is also a suspect and we will be dealing with her shortly.”

“No!” Han shouted out, “No, no, you can’t do this… you can’t… whatever vendetta the Major Generals have against me-”

“We have not been sent by the Major Generals.”

“WHATEVER GODDAMN VENDETTA FUCKING STALIN HAS AGAINST ME, LEAVE MY WIFE AND MY SON OUT OF IT!”

“So, you’re saying, your wife was not part of the scheme?”

“There was no scheme! None! I did not sell information to the Nazis, and I have not spoken to that fucking bastard of a brother-in-law for five bloody years. He may as well be dead to me and I have absolutely no intention of speaking to him ever again.”

“Colonel Solo. This arrest is not based on a vendetta, or a plot to get you out of the way, though I’m sure many would like that very much. The information for the charges against you comes directly from the Central Intelligence Agency itself, and they have provided us extensive proof incriminating you as the guilty party, including….” The man fished out a document from his coat pocket, “a signed testimony from Luke Skywalker himself,” he said, straightening the document and showing it to the Colonel.

Han’s eyes went wide in recognition of Luke’s handwriting, his characteristic rounded _r_ ’s and wobbly letters and his messy signature.

“How do you plead?”

Han eyes went from the document to the man’s face, and back again, “This isn’t- Luke wouldn’t say something like this-”

“So, you admit, you have been in contact with Luke Skywalker recently?”

“No, that’s not what I’m saying-”

“Dad…” a child’s timid voice turned Han’s attention away from the document and the man’s thin bony face, to see his son, his black hair slightly falling over his eyes now, his tie a bit loose, tears streaming down his cheeks, “Dad, I- I’m scared. What’s happening?”

Han looked at the boy, tears falling from his own eyes too, realization finally hitting him. Whatever he was going to say now in his own defense, was not going to work. People rarely, if ever, came back from death’s door once their name had been inscribed on Stalin’s _kill lists_. They were not here to question him or let him offer an explanation for the accusations against him.  Their questioning now was essentially the same as watching a chicken panic and tremble right before the knife slit its throat. Just, for the fun of it.

Because when death knocks at your door in Moscow, there are only ever two options it gives you.

The Gulag.

Or the cold.

Han wondered what his fate was going to be in the next few minutes, as he closed his eyes, tears falling more rapidly now, and looked up at his butcher. In his most pitiable voice, he said, “Please. Don’t do it in front of my son,” trying to connect to some humanity that by some miracle, might not have been purged and washed away during his training.

The man looked down, considering Han’s request, finally looking up, to say, “We are not monsters, Colonel Han Solo. Only the knights of Premier Stalin’s righteous justice. We will let you say your goodbyes for a minute.” He motioned for his men to step back from the Colonel and let the boy go. As soon as he was out of the man’s grasp, Ben ran towards his father, clinging to his leg, crying and crying.

“Dad! What do they mean, “goodbye”? Dad! Dad! What’s going to happen, Dad! I want to go home!”

“Ben…” Han said, softly running his hands through the boy’s hair, “Ben, please listen to me…” Han knelt down and wiped the boy’s tears off his cheek with his thumb, his own falling down in a stream now, “You won’t be able to go home for a long time now, _moy khoroshyi_ , but you’ve got to promise me something, kid.”

“Anything, anything!” the boy shook his head, “Just take me home,” he hugged his father again.

“Promise me, _Benushka_ ,” Han whispered in the boy’s ear, “Promise me. You will never believe what they tell you.”

“What? What’s that supposed to mean, Dad?” the boy said through sobs.

“You’ll understand one day.” Han stood up, detaching the boy’s arms from around his neck, “I am so, so sorry, Ben.”

The man, who was interrogating Han earlier, took hold of the child, gripping him tightly, even though he resisted and tried to break away from the man’s iron grip. “Dad!” he screamed, “ _Nyet!_ _Vy ne mozhete umeret!” No! You cannot die! “Ty obeschal!” You promised._  

But he hadn’t really.

The rest of men took Han outside, while Ben thrashed and screamed and cried.

A single gun shot resounded in the air. A loud thud followed. And Ben collapsed.

His throat was dry from so much screaming, and his body was out of energy from all the crying, and his heart felt numb. The gun shot was still ringing in his ears, and he imagined his father, lying with his skull half open, his blood oozing out, brains scattered all over the snow, and he didn’t flinch, and he didn’t cry. He just didn’t, anymore. A switch had flipped, and he had found himself without the ability to move, or cry, or scream. Or feel.

The man knelt beside the boy. He was bald. His face looked like it was caved in, his dead eyes lying in their sockets like a man lying down in a grave, there were wrinkles all over his face and a huge scar right in the middle of his forehead. The veins in his long neck were bluer than most, a stark contrast against his icy skin.

Distant voices of cheering and hooting and playful accordions hung in the silence between them. “Welcome to the First Order, my boy,” the man whispered to Ben, scooping him up in his arms and leading him outside.

* * *

 

** January 1964 **

Ben spent the first seventeen years of his life, stepping in and out of consciousness. Or was it sixteen? He didn’t remember. He didn’t remember when it started, and he didn’t remember when it ended. The memories in his head, of a childhood he might have had some time or a future he may have dreamed of, were all jumbled up. When was he born? Did his mother have brown hair? Did his father’s eyes crinkle when he smiled? He didn’t remember any of it. The memories were all distorted, going from the flash of a camera as it took a family photo to the feeling of his eyes burning from the intensity of rays, or from a lovely day playing out in the river in July, to the feeling of drowning as water filled his lungs and burned at his insides. A laugh melded into a scream, a smile morphed into a slit wrist. He didn’t remember which one came before, and which after. Memories were like, the pits and bumps on a gramophone record, that had been scratched and altered and rewritten so many times, he didn’t recognize the song anymore.

In his seventeenth year, Lieutenant General Snoke took him outside the institution for the first time in what felt like months, though it hadn’t really been that long, he just kept forgetting. He thrust a key in his hand and drove him to a building and told him he would live in his own apartment now.

He didn’t remember that very well either.

The earliest memory Ben had, a memory he was sure no one had tampered with, was one of a small and insignificant event in the winter of 1964.

It wasn’t unusual for boys at the institution to push him around and beat him up. Though usually the memories of the boys cursing at him, calling his father, “a Nazi bastard” and his mother, “a Jewish whore,” used to just blend into one another, white noise for him basically. He didn’t remember any of their faces, or any of their voices. He used to come to the same building every day, take his daily allowance, hear them spew a stream of insults at him, study, fight and go home.  Until one day.

The Russian teacher was on maternity leave (or had she died? He could not, for the life of him, remember) and a substitute was appointed. _Laryssa_ , the woman’s name was _. Laryssa_. Ben didn’t know why it felt so good to say the name out loud. “Laryssa,” he whispered to himself again.

Ben had intended nothing out of the ordinary for this day in particular. It would meld right into the existing pile of days he couldn’t tell apart from one another. He was going to go to the institution, get cursed at, get his daily allowance, study, fight and go home. Except, that on this day in particular, Laryssa, or Ms. Laryssa as he called her out loud, who had been at the institution for three weeks now, called him into her office after the day was over.

She handed him a cup of tea and offered him a seat on a chair in front of her. He refused. She continued to speak.

“Ben,” she said, “It’s not true, you know that, right?”

“What isn’t true?”

“Ben…” the woman began. “Your father… he was a true hero of the war. Your mother, the most gifted pianist Russia has ever seen. The rest are lies. It’s not true, what those boys say, you know that, right? Right?”

“Yes,” Ben replied robotically, but inside he was not so sure as to who is parents were besides a file that had been shown to him countless times. He didn’t really understand why he should care at all if what they said was true or was not. “Yes, I am aware that it is not true,” Ben again replied robotically, not really understanding the situation at all.

“Good I don’t want those boys to upset you.”

“They don’t upset me.”

“Really?” Laryssa looked at him (he remembered that she smiled), “Well. Either way, it was my duty to check up on you.”

She bid him farewell and Ben went to his apartment and slept.

The next morning, he came to the building, stood in line for the morning’s assembly, and looked around.

Laryssa wasn’t there.

He recited the anthem and went to class. He didn’t remember who came after as Laryssa’s substitute.

After work, Lieutenant Colonel Snoke called him into his office.

“I’ve heard the boys here bully you quite a lot,” he spoke softly.

“Yes. I am aware.”

“I think you should pick a name, a name other than Ben Solo. People are going to bully you all your life with a name like that, and the shame that comes with it.”

“What did you have in mind?”

“Me? Oh no. I’m leaving the choice up to you.”

“That’s very gracious of you.”

“Think about it and tell me tomorrow.”

“I will. Thank you,” he said, turning to leave.

He didn’t remember why, and he didn’t remember the face of the man that spoke but just then, a memory he wasn’t sure was real echoed in his mind.

“ _Promise me,”_ a man said, “ _You will never believe what they tell you.”_

He had never promised anyway.

.

“Kylo.”

“What was that?”

“Kylo Ren. That… will be my name.” he said, as he shut the door behind him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> moy khoroshyi = my boy  
> Benushka = Russian people often put a suffix to the names of people they love, sort of like a nickname  
> Solnyshko= sunny  
> Kalinka = little red berry  
> kalinka moya = little red berry of mine  
> V sadu yagoda malinka, malinka moya = in the garden, there is a raspberry, a raspberry of mine


	5. Lacrimosa

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to whutotthewhut, for her help on this one. Go check out her tumblr [here](http://whutotthewhut.tumblr.com/) ! This is the biggest chapter i have ever written, almost 12000 words, and my beta-reader has stuck with me through it all. I can't thank her enough! Be sure to leave a kudos and please comment as well if you enjoyed it! :)
> 
> Based on Mozart's beautiful piece Lacrimosa, and [this enchanting performance](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1i8H-W8N-aU) by Yevgeny Sudbin.

** Saint Petersburg, March 1988 **

Rey sat on her rotating leather chair. Legs perched up on the wooden table in front of her, one over the other with black leather boots still on, all the while dripping water on the small beechwood counter and rocking from side to side comfortably with her back against the chair. The room was quiet except for the noise of the CPU fans that seemed obnoxiously louder today, the prickling light from the computer screens, the only source of light in the dark loft, burned her eyes, as she stared at a map; the icon on it continued its beeping announcing the location of their target to the room. Rey raised the cigarette she was holding between her fingers to her lips, inhaling a puff. Warm smoke filled her lungs, and Rey threw her head back, feeling the nicotine slowly permeate into her blood vessels.

Rey looked at the cigarette she was holding, the words “ _Winston_ ” inscribed in bold capital letters around the end.

“Isn’t in ironic?” she asked.

Kylo turned around in the chair beside her, his hair disheveled, dark circles beneath his eyes. He dropped his glasses from his forehead, where they were resting, to his eyes and looked at his watch. _4.35 am_ , the digits read.

“What is?” he replied.

“Winston…” she said, leaning forward to flick the ash off her cigarette in the ashtray with her thumb, “is an _American_ brand,” she scoffed, “And for some reason, you Russians can’t get enough of it.”

Kylo sighed, turning back to the computer screen, “Those things will kill you, you know?” he said, rubbing his eyes.

Rey growled; he had already said that three times to her in the last hour. “Could you repeat that?” she said sarcastically.

Kylo turned back to face the girl, “I said-” but before he could get the sentence out, Rey blew a puff of smoke right into his face, fogging up his glasses, and making him cough violently.

“I heard you the last three times,” Rey said, annoyed, slumping back in her chair, turning back to the screen, inhaling another puff of smoke. The nicotine hadn’t kicked in yet, and she still felt so sleepy.

“Well, it will,” Kylo said, having stopped coughing and taking off his glasses to wipe the fog off by the hem of his shirt. “And until you stop smoking, or until one of us dies, I’ll keep telling you to stop. Nothing you can do about it.”

“I could try killing you, that’s a valid option,” Rey mumbled under her breath.

“The second-hand smoke from your cigarettes will probably kill me before you even have a chance to.”

“All the better, then,” Rey inhaled another puff, and blew it in his direction. Kylo raised his hands up to dissipate the smoke and sighed defeatedly.

 They sat in silence again, for the next few minutes.

“It’s your fault anyway,” Rey began after a while.

“My fault? _Your_ smoking addiction is _my_ fault?” Kylo questioned, amused.

“Damn straight, it is. It’s so bloody cold in here. Would it kill you to get central heating in our loft?”

“ _Our_ loft? You haven’t made the rent in three _fucking_ months!”

“Would you rather have me starve?”

“At this point, kind of, yeah.”

Rey hmphed, “Wouldn’t look good on your resume,” she mumbled.

Another few minutes passed before any of them said anything.

“Give that here.”

“What?”

“The cigarette. Give it here.”

“Weren’t you just explaining to me how deadly these are and everything?”

“Look, Rey. It’s early, and I’m tired, and I don’t have the patience for this bullshit. So, just give me the cigarette, alright?” Kylo groaned, his elbows on the desk, thumbs massaging his forehead.

“Geez, fine, alright” she said, taking one last whiff of smoke, before tapping the man on the shoulder, and handing over the half-smoked cigarette to him. Kylo turned the cigarette around in his hand, examining it, moving it from between his index and middle finger to between his thumb and his index. Then, he crushed the cigarette in his fist, rolled it up and threw it across the loft towards a dustbin. The cigarette butt missed by several feet.

“Hey!” Rey exclaimed, annoyed, “What did you do that for?”

Kylo turned to look at her, raising his eyebrows. “Pretty self-explanatory, really.”

“Still!” Rey glared at him, raising herself up from her chair to take out the box of cigarettes from her jeans and the lighter from her coat. She placed another cigarette between her lips, enveloping the sides of it with her palms and flipped open her lighter, setting fire to the end of the thin cylinder.

Kylo sighed, turning back to the computer. They didn’t speak again for two hours.

* * *

 

Rey woke up at _6.14 am_ with the cigarette still hanging from her lips. _Bad decision_ , she thought; her mouth burned now, and some of the ash had fallen on her shirt, burning a whole in it. She raised her neck up (it ached terribly) to look beside her. Kylo was still awake, staring blankly at the screen, occasionally rubbing his eyes to prevent himself from falling asleep.

“Ugh,” Rey groaned, getting up from her chair to stretch her arms above her head. “The fat pig hasn’t moved in 16 hours! What _is_ he doing?”

 Kylo turned to look at her, unimpressed by her complaining, shrugged his shoulders and went back to the screen.

“And this thing,” she pointed to the cigarette between her fingers, “isn’t _fucking_ working! The nicotine is supposed to keep me awake, _goddammit_!”

Kylo groaned, stretching his neck back, “There’s only so much the nicotine can do,” he said, tiredly, “We haven’t slept in two days.” He slumped back into his chair, taking off his glasses and closing his eyes.

Rey looked around the loft. Their desks were a complete and utter mess. While her side was filled with scattered ash and the plastic wrappers of various kinds of snacks, Kylo’s side was decidedly worse. Stacks of paper and maps and glass cola bottles littered the beechwood counter, little sticky notes and pieces of thread were attached to the desktop screen, pens and pencils scattered all around. If Rey’s side of the mess reached Kylo’s side, the stacks of paper would spontaneously combust, and the result would be an absolute disaster. The thought was scary, of course, but it didn’t stop Rey from annoyedly inhaling another round of smoke into her lungs.

“Don’t you think we should at least consider that he might have found out about the bug we placed on him the other day?”

“Unkar Plutt? Please. He’d never figure it out if we waved it around in his fat ugly face, the dumb prick…” Kylo said, annoyed.

“Hey, the cursing is my thing!”

“Your influence tends to wear one down when one hasn’t slept in two days.”

“Isn’t there a wireless device we could use?” Rey said, crossing the loft to unbolt the windows, swinging them open, immediately regretting her decision as a gust of cold air blew into the room, making her teeth chatter. She wrapped the shawl she was wearing tighter around her shoulders and took another whiff from her cigarette.

The loft was on the third floor of a mostly abandoned building, in what any upstanding citizen would classify as an undoubtedly ‘shady’ part of town. The view from the windows was terrible; nothing but cut down trees, some metal shops with the scrap metal and car frames lying out in the open, and the only departmental store in the whole block across the road. People were sparse, especially at six in the morning, but at any other time of the day too, the only sound that could be heard was that of trucks passing by occasionally. It was a perfect location for the mission they were supposed to carry out, but absolutely dreadful for everything else.

“There _is_ a device we can use, but someone still has to monitor it,” Kylo told her, “We can’t go to sleep until he moves.”

“What if he never moves?” Rey turned back, “Are we supposed to wait till we die?”

“That is the idea, yes.”

“Ugh,” Rey groaned, “There’s something about the wind here that just… sucks the soul right out of you,” she commented, dropping her cigarette out the window. It fell three stories, and into the snow that had fallen through the night yesterday.

“It’s supposed to…” Kylo sighed softly from the desk.

The loft itself, was huge, bigger than either of them had the need for, and as a result, most of the space went empty. There were two rooms on opposite ends of the vacant space, one for Rey and one for Kylo. The space in the middle had very little furniture, a few chairs here and there, the desks and the computers, and a few boards with notes and paper stuck on it with common pins. They had decided to allocate a small space for a make-shift kitchen, which had a refrigerator and a stove, along with some basic utensils in a cabinet above it, but both Rey and Kylo barely ever used it, opting to go out and eat some fast food instead, usually at some very ungodly hour of the night since the shops would always remain open anyway. Suffice it to say, for the last three months, since Rey had arrived in Russia to find Skywalker they had been leading a supremely unhealthy lifestyle, based usually on a diet on cigarettes and alcohol.

“Well if we must monitor it at all times, why can’t we just take the device outside?” Her stomach rumbled then, as if on cue. “I really want to eat some borscht, right about now.”

The man sighed, “Fine,” he muttered, “But it’ll take me a while to program it,” he said sliding open the drawer to his desk and taking out a small book-shaped monitor. He fished around in the drawer for a while, moving around the papers and the wrappers, until he pulled out a long connecting wire from it and attached it to one end of the device. He stood up for his chair, pushing his glasses back up on his forehead, and went to attach the other end of the wire with the Central Processing Unit behind the desktop.

“It’ll take maybe, half an hour or so,” he declared, after typing in a few things into his computer.

“Alright,” Rey nodded, “I’m going to go to the store across the road,” she said, taking out the now empty box of cigarettes from her back pocket and tossing it towards the dustbin. “I’m out of cigarettes.”

“Those-” Kylo began but Rey cut him off, “I swear to God if you tell me these will kill me again, I’m going back to Langley.”

“Not exactly a scary threat, because I would like that more than anything.” Kylo scoffed.

“Hux wouldn’t,” Rey said, leaving the loft, closing the door behind her.

* * *

 

 When Rey came back twenty minutes later, with a pack of cigarettes in one hand and a bar of chocolate in the other, Kylo had already programmed the device, and was now setting up an antenna near the window to send and receive the signals while they were on the move. His shirt hitched up as he extended his arms out the window, adjusting the flaps of the antenna, revealing a single angry scar across his right loin. Rey wondered if she had been the source of that scar, remembering when she had sliced him across his back and his face, the first time they had met. Kylo’s face still had the scar, although it was fading slightly now. It wasn’t even noticeable anymore from where Rey was standing _. I wonder how many other scars he has_ , she thought, but quickly shook her head, trying to remove the image from her mind.

The device that was still connected to the computer beeped and Kylo seized his movements. “Hey, did the device find the signal yet?” he shouted back to Rey.

Rey shoved her pack of cigarettes and the chocolate bar in her pockets and moved forward towards the computer. The device was beeping now, a map on its tiny screen, a dot indicating the position of the target. _Still the same_ , Rey groaned.

“Yeah!” she shouted back to Kylo, picking up her wallet from the desk and slipping it in the pocket of her jacket. 

“Good,” Kylo exhaled, climbing back into the room, rubbing his hands together to dust off the dirt. Crossing the loft to the other side, he disappeared into his room for a little while, emerging again with his characteristic black jacket, and his hair combed back, swinging the car keys around his finger.  

“Let’s go,” Rey said, Kylo following behind her.

* * *

 

Though it may seem like they were cut-throat enemies to the outside observer, ready to slice open each other’s veins with their knives and their words, Rey and Kylo were not adversaries. Anyone who would see them now, knowing them three months ago about to kill the other on a stone pavement, would definitely say they had come a long way from smashing the other’s skull in against a porcelain sink (something Rey could not bring herself to do then, and would definitely not dream of now). _Were they friends, then?_ Rey wondered, unfamiliar with the concept, having never had a “friend” before. Finn came close, but at the end of the day, he was a guard meant to keep her on her leash. They were definitely “friendly” with each other, though never outside the parameters of their work background.

 _Is this friendship_? Rey wondered again, for the millionth time since that hand-shake at the diner in East-Berlin, a cute blonde waitress laying down a plate of borscht in front of her, a similar plate being set down at the table opposite her, where Kylo now sat, eyes never leaving the monitor in his hands.

It was a weird relationship they had, to say the least. The insults were mean, and quite frequent, but not cruel. Never cruel. They were meant to annoy the other, put them at ease in an uncomfortable situation, or at _un-ease_ when they got too cocky for their own good, but never were they un-kind. The two knew too much about cruelty to want to inflict any on the other, intentionally or unintentionally. They knew the feeling of being broken and dissolved by words all too well.  So yes, Rey kept smoking despite Kylo’s clear annoyance and yes, Kylo kept shooting at random objects in the loft (a habit that was the cause of several dozen bullet holes in most of Rey’s furniture; though, Kylo would never admit to any of it being _Rey’s_ , due to the fact that she hadn’t paid the rent yet) despite Rey’s vehement cursing, but after three months cooped up in one loft together, working on the same _goddamn_ mission, Rey would not hesitate to call them… _Acquaintances_ , at the very least.

“ _Bol’shoye spasibo_ ,” Rey cheerfully said to the waitress, after Kylo refused to look up from his screen. (Rey wasn’t allowed to speak a lot of Russian when he was around, and she preferred it that way too, seeing as how terrible her accent really was.) The waitress furrowed her eyebrows, made a disapproving face, muttering something that sounded a lot like, “Americans...” under her breath and walked away. Rey didn’t pay her any mind, digging into the warm plate of borscht in front of her.

“You really don’t even try to fit in, do you?” Kylo murmured from across the table, but Rey ignored him.

Rey scooped up some soup from the dish, that was topped with sour cream, fresh basil leaves, parmesan shavings and sausages, holding the spoon in front of her mouth, blowing on it to help cool it down. An involuntary sigh escaped her when she tasted it, the taste of warm tomato sauce, seasoned to perfection, filling her mouth. She hadn’t eaten for more than twenty-four hours; she imagined she wouldn’t have noticed even if the borscht was bad because of just how hungry she was, but _damn_ , if this wasn't the best damn borscht she had ever had. Her heart let out a silent prayer for the chef that had cooked it, as she dipped the garlic bread into the soup and ate it.

She was so engrossed in her food, that when she looked up, Kylo was staring at her, a disapproving look on his face.

“What?” Rey mumbled, mouth stuffed with bread and soup.

“You’re acting like you haven’t eaten in days,” Kylo said, gracefully picking up his own spoon, laying the monitor down on the table, where it was still where his eyes could see it.

“Well, I haven’t actually,” Rey shoveled another bite of bread into her mouth.

“It’s your own fault, though,” he said, “All you do is smoke and eat chocolate. Not exactly a healthy diet.”

“And you don’t eat at all, so who’s to say who has the unhealthier diet?”

“Still me. Because you don’t see me making a spectacle of myself in a restaurant.”

“Ugh,” Rey growled, “Just eat your damn soup, okay?”

“Whatever you say,” he mumbled.

Just then, the point on the monitor moved. Rey and Kylo both dropped their spoons, an audible clank as the metal hit ceramic plate.

“Did you just see what I saw?”

“Yup…” Rey replied.

The indictor moved again, this time more quickly, as if the culprit was on a moving vehicle. Kylo left his plate, and got up, removing his black jacket from the back of his chair, and slipping an arm through one of the sleeves.

Rey groaned, “In the middle of my fucking breakfast?”

“Just shut up, and get going, alright, we don’t want to lose him, he could go out of rang—”

“Yeah, yeah,” she replied, getting one last sip of borscht before getting up. Kylo had already reached the front door.

“Hey, who’s gonna pay for this?” she shouted at him. He shrugged his shoulders as a reply.

Rey groaned, taking off her jacket from the back of her chair, slipping it on and removing her hair from underneath. She slammed three fifty-ruble notes on the table annoyedly and made her way back to the car.

* * *

 

It had seemed odd to them, that Unkar Plutt hadn’t moved from his location in over eighteen hours, but definitely not as odd as the dozen police cars that now stood outside the warehouse when they arrived at the man’s last known location.

Unkar Plutt was a dangerous man (albeit quite a stupid one), being the fourth-in-command of Russia’s underground mafia and all, youngest brother of the Hutt family, that now controlled the entire illegal firearms and narcotic smuggling ring in Russia and in small parts of Eastern Germany. Being the youngest, he had commanded next to no respect in the family, especially not in front of his much older brother, Jabba, nicknamed _The Hutt_ , because of his wide-ranging influence over not only Russia’s criminal underworld, but also its politics, the police force, and even some high-level officials of the military. In front of Jabba, and his two younger brothers, Unkar Plutt was basically the outcast of the family. No one really cared what he did, and no one really told him about their plans, as long he showed up at the right time with the rest of goons whenever he was called upon. But the fact that he was such a neglected member of the Russian mafia, often meant that he would go out on his own, on his own little adventures. And _that_ is where Rey and Kylo came in.

Two months into their search, Rey and Kylo still had no leads as to the location of Luke Skywalker, but that was when Finn told Rey that Poe Dameron, a somewhat _trustworthy_ NPA officer, had told the CIA that he had heard from a friend of a friend of someone who worked for Plutt that he had recently bought a floppy disc at an auction for hefty sums of money, that supposedly had the last known whereabouts of defected CIA and KGB spies, Luke Skywalker included. _Supposedly._

They had no leads to speak of, anyway, and so for the next month, they had spent their time tracking Plutt’s movements, stealthily breaking into his apartments to search for the disc, beating up his goons for information, but with no luck.

“Why are there so many police cars here?” Rey asked Kylo.

“No fucking clue, kid,” he replied, rummaging through the glove compartment of his car for his fake police ID.  Rey hmphed, “Didn’t know you had that,” she said.

“Comes in handy sometimes,” he waved the ID in her face, “Come on, let’s go. Just let me do the talking, yeah?”

“Sure, whatever,” she replied, opening her side of the door and stepping on to the pavement.

The abandoned warehouse they now stood in front of, was located around a corner on the block that was notoriously famous for a site where shady drug deals and mass shootouts often occurred, which more often than not went completely unreported by the police, and of course, that came as a shock to absolutely nobody, not when it was an open secret that three-fourths of the police department were in the Mafia’s pocket anyway.

Two officers, who were posted outside the gate to the warehouse, stopped them as they approached. “ _Identifikatsiya, pozhaluysta,”_ they asked them. Kylo whipped open his identification card, with his photo neatly cut and his fake information displayed in bold capital letter under a fake police stamp, “Detective Yegor Ushakov,” he said in Russian, “I’m here on the Unkar Plutt case. And this,” he gestured behind him where Rey stood, eyeing her weirdly, trying to think of a convincing name, “is my associate,” he turned back, “Kira Ilyinishna.”  _Kira Ilyinishna, huh?_ Rey wondered _. Quick thinking._  

The officers let them pass, not paying Kylo’s ID much mind, and the two stepped inside the dark, dimly-lit warehouse to the stench… of death.

The first things Rey noticed were the two bodies, grotesquely displayed in the middle of the giant room. Three forensic photographers crowded around the corpses, busily taking photos from every angle with varying degrees of light, every flash revealing the bruises on their bodies, the purplish marks that riddled their thighs, the violent slashes along their naked backs, and the blood that pooled around their head soaking up their long beautiful blonde locks in crimson and red. They didn’t seem that old, the girls, around sixteen to eighteen, Rey estimated from the youthfulness of their bodies and their turned faces.  They were lying on their backs, their breasts to the cold marble floor, cold violet bruises forming intricate patterns down their cold arms and legs, a gaping bullet wound in their skull.

Rey stared, horrified.

A few policemen approached them then, asking for their identification. Kylo introduced the two of them to the fat policemen, calmly sipping on their coffee from its Styrofoam cup, unaffected by the bodies lying mere feet away from them. The men assessed his ID then asked for Rey’s.

“She’s new to the division, officers, as you can see,” Kylo answered, “She doesn’t have her detective’s ID yet.”

“Does she not have a tongue, either?” The man questioning Kylo laughed uproariously.

Kylo joined in hesitantly, internally disgusted by the men’s blatant lack of respect for the grave situation, adding, “She’s a shy one, this.”

Rey gaped at Kylo, shocked at how he managed to keep his composure even in a situation like this, Kylo offered her a guilt-ridden apologetic look. _I’m sorry I have to do this, but this is the only way I can get any information_ , his eyes seemed to tell her. He turned back, continuing his chat with the policemen.

“So, do you have any leads, as to who may have committed this crime?”

“Oh, right,” the man halted his laughter, stuffing a pastry from a nearby table into his mouth, “The parents of these girls reported them missing a week ago,” he said, with his mouth full, “They said they went to the local high school in their block in the morning and didn’t come back after that. We surveyed the school, asked around with the teachers and everything but,” he stopped chewing, “they don’t know nothin’.”

“It’s fairly obvious who did this, isn’t it, officers?” Kylo commented, “I mean, this warehouse does belong to-”

“Wait, wait, wait, Mister, I’m gonna stop you right there. We don’t have any, _any_ , leads. _No_ witnesses whatsoever, and _no_ suspects at this point. I suggest you remove whatever pre-conceived notions you have of this…” he moved his hands around, gesturing vaguely, “ _affair_ , and you leave them at the door. You don’t want the wrong sort to hear to you say that…”

Kylo glared at him, visibly annoyed, “Well, what are the victims’ names, then?” he asked, in a clinical unaffected voice.

“Right, their names,” he picked up a file from the desk beside him, opening and turning the pages with his sticky, frosting covered fingers, “The tall one over there,” the man pointed to the girl lying on the left, and Rey grimaced from his use of the phrase, ‘the tall one’ as if the girl was nothing but a piece of meat, “is Katya Makarovna. And the one next to her is…” he pointed to the right, shuffling through a few documents hastily bounded into the file, “ _Laryssa_ Nikitovich.”

Kylo took in a sharp intake of breath, and Rey looked at him from the corner of her eye. She didn’t know why Kylo’s face suddenly went so white, his fists clenched so tight, she thought he might draw blood.

“So, you’re saying everyone that you asked, knew nothing?”

“Yes, that’s right. They were just two young high schoolers, at the wrong place at the wrong time, unfortunately.”

“And now they’re dead,” Kylo said, turning back to the policeman, his expression deadly, “Raped and beaten. In an abandoned warehouse, known to be the site of activity for the Hutt’s and you’re just-”

“Hey, hey, hey now,” the man stopped eating and patted the man on the shoulder, “Don’t just go around throwing names like that, ye hear? Not really good for one’s health, let me tell you that. Be sure to remember that now, won’t ya?”

“Not good for my health, is it?” Kylo replied, his eyes turning into slits, his glare making the other shorter man gulp. “I suggest you hand over those files to me now, officer. Seeing as I am your superior, after all. And also, I don’t think you’ll be needing them anymore, since you’ve already declared this case a closed one.”

“Uh…” the man murmured, “Yeah… sure…” he stated, clearly disturbed by Kylo’s intimidation tactics, handing over the file to the much taller man before him.

“Thank you,” Kylo said, menacingly, as he turned around to walk out of the warehouse, Rey following behind him.

“Listen,” the man said behind him, and Kylo stopped walking. “We don’t want to rile anyone up in this town, you hear? Spreading rumors like that…”

Kylo was about to say something, when Rey cut him off, “You have two dead mutilated children on your hands,” she said, in what little Russian she could manage, “I think somebody else is doing the riling.”

* * *

 

“We could’ve stopped them.” Rey said as soon as they stepped inside the car.

Kylo sighed, “No. No, we couldn’t have,” he turned the key around in the ignition, the engine revved, but the car didn’t start. He tried again, and again, yet the automobile refused to start, until he gave up, and thumped his head against the cushion of his car seat.

“We knew he was here….and we did nothing.  And while he was… those girls… _God_...” Rey mumbled, her voice a broken whisper.

“We didn’t know it was going to be…this,” Kylo shook his head.

“Bullshit…” Rey replied, “Those are just… excuses…I knew we should’ve gone sooner. I knew…” her voice was breaking up, a hitch in her throat, a sharp intake of breath; Kylo could hear she was trying hard not to cry but tears welled up in her eyes anyway, that she tried to blink away.

It was easy for Kylo to forget sometimes, how young Rey still was. Already so world-weary at twenty-eight years of age. She looked and acted like a hardened killer, and in most cases, she was exactly that, ready to bash in a man’s skull open on a porcelain sink or shoot her way through an army of people she was ordered to kill. But even the most hardened killer can not help but be unhinged at the sight of such blatant cruelty and injustice.

The tears in Rey’s eyes now, was what told Kylo that underneath all that strict hardened soldier persona, she was still… human. Something Kylo didn’t think he could call himself, nor felt like, after all he had seen and done.

Just then, he did something he did not expect himself to do; he leaned forward, surprising Rey out of her grief, and he hugged her.

Rey stared at him, her eyes wide open. But then she let her body relax against his embrace, defeatedly and buried her face in his shoulder, letting the tears fall freely, quietly onto his jacket, weeping for a loss that she hadn’t felt in a long time, but was reminded of oh so cruelly, mere moments ago.

Neither of them knew how long they stayed like that, Rey’s head buried in his shoulder, her hands clutching at his jacket, bunching up the fabric there, as Kylo stared outside, his chin resting on her hair.

* * *

 

Hours later, Rey found herself skimming through the pages of the file that they had obtained, going through the girls’ - no, Katya and Laryssa’s- biodata: their residence, their jobs and their education, a section stating in bold capital letters the high school they attended, _Saint Petersburg Lyceum 30_. The drive to the school was a quiet one, a comfortable silence though, neither of them felt as upset anymore, and Kylo was beginning to wonder if he had needed that embrace more than Rey had. He couldn’t remember the last time he had felt so many things in the span of minutes. Anger at the law, despair for the children he had witnessed cut open and mutilated, a sense of connection with his American comrade, and maybe just the slightest hint of affection for her, though the last one he would dare not admit to himself.

Rey hadn’t spoken to him yet. And the fabric of his shirt was still damp at the shoulder, from her tears.

 _What a strange woman_ , he thought to himself, as Rey stared out the window at the passing cars and snow-laden trees, _a weeping mess one minute, and a deadly soldier the next._

Her eyes were always kind though, no matter what persona she wore, kind and with a passion that burned like a fire that could not be extinguished.

 _How long had it been since that light had died from his eyes?_ He wondered. _Or had it ever really existed?_

As he pulled into the driveway, Rey finally spoke, “So, what’s the plan?”

“Huh?” Kylo answered, snapping himself out of his train of thought.

“I was looking through the files and I saw that the statements of all the teachers here have been recorded except one, a Miss. Alexandra Alena. She’s probably the one to talk to, right?”

“Right…” Kylo agreed, “Do _you_ want… to talk to her, this time?”

“Me?” Rey said, surprised, “I thought my Russian was the worst butchering of the Russian language you had ever heard?”

Kylo chuckled at that, “That’s not _entirely_ _un_ true. But your Russian isn’t _as_ bad as I make it out to be. You skip your _r_ ’s too much, that makes anyone see you’re not from around here. But no matter, just say you’re from Latvia or Ukraine… they probably haven’t heard the Russian dialects from there anyway…”

She smiled, “Alright,” and got out of the car.

* * *

 

Class was still in session when they arrived at the classroom where Alexandra taught Mathematics. The two of them had waited until the bell rang, about fifteen minutes or so, when the children stormed out of the classroom like wild animals let out of their cages, running down the hall to the cafeteria as quickly as their legs could manage. The teacher stood at her desk, her brown hair falling over her shoulder, arranging her materials and books, when she noticed the tall man standing in front of her now.

“Yes? May I help you?” she said in a worried voice.

“Yes, hello, I’m Detective Yegor Ushakov,” Kylo introduced himself, flipping open his fake ID, “I’m here to ask some questions on the Laryssa and Katya case, the two students of yours who passed away this morning?”

The woman before him visibly tensed, and her eyes darted to the door, “I don’t understand why you’re here, since the police already asked me everything when they came here a week ago….”

Rey and Kylo looked at each other, “Did they now?” Rey murmured, the woman to his side, “Uh, sorry, I’m his associate, Detective Kira Ilyinishna. Pleased to meet you, Miss Alexandra.”

Kylo noticed that the woman seemed far more comfortable with Rey, by how her lips curved up into a shy smile as she shook her hand, so he stepped back, letting Rey step forward. The sight of a six-feet-four-inches tall man, clad in black, doesn’t exactly make a five-feet tall woman feel comfortable.

“Please. Call me Sasha,” the woman said warmly, “I haven’t met a female police officer before.”

“Well, yes, unfortunately there are only a few of us here…”

“Would you like some water?” she asked her, sitting down on her teacher’s chair, offering her a seat in front of her on the student’s desk.

“Yes, please, thank you,” Rey smiled back.

Sasha opened her drawer to look for her bottle of water. Meanwhile, Rey motioned for Kylo, who was still standing, to come closer to her. He bent down, “I think you should go take a walk outside, I can probably handle this,” Rey whispered in his ear.

“Yes, you’re probably right. I’ll leave you two to it,” he whispered back, “Just don’t lose your vocabulary alright?”

Rey rolled her eyes, as Kylo stood up straight and made to leave the classroom.

“Won’t your associate be joining us?” Sasha asked her, pouring water into just one cup.

“No, unfortunately. He got a call from the station and had to leave for some urgent business.”

“Ah, I see,” Sasha replied, not sounding remorseful in the slightest.

“Thank you,” Rey replied, picking up the water from the table and taking a sip.

“What a tragedy about those girls… they were good students of mine. Would’ve had good careers in mathematics or the sciences. Their parents called me this morning from the police station… What a tragedy, indeed…” she repeated.

“Are you close with their parents’?”

“Not with Katya’s, no. But _Larushka’s_ parents are quite protective of her, so they often call me to ask how she’s doing and everything. They invited me to dinner once. They’re good people.”

“And what about Katya and Laryssa? Did you know them well?”

“Yes, I did,” she said, slumping back into her chair, “Absolutely inseparable, those two. They’ve been neighbors and best friends since… since they were in fourth grade, I think. I used to teach them mathematics in grade four, before I got promoted to the tenth grade. I actually taught them last year too, they were in my class. Now they are in eleventh-” she cut herself off, “ _were_ in eleventh,” Sasha fiddled with her thumbs nervously and Rey moved her chair closer to her desk.

“Sasha…” Rey began, “What I’m about to disclose to you, you are not to reveal to anybody else. Do you understand?”

Sasha nodded.

“The house where Katya and Laryssa’s bodies were found, belonged to… Unkar Plutt. Do you know if they had any connections at all with the Russian Mafia?”

Rey wasn’t sure what she was expecting from Sasha’s reaction, but Sasha seemed utterly unsurprised by the news. “I do,” she replied.

“Katya and Laryssa used to do everything together… Last summer, they started waitressing in a small diner, for some extra pocket money, but the hours were too long and the money wasn’t good at all. So, Katya… she found another job…”

“…which was…?”

“She found a babysitting job. For _Jabba_ _the Hutt’s_ five-year-old great granddaughter.”

“No…”

“Yes. Their parents and I both tried to talk them out of it, but they insisted that the money was good and both of them could work the same job on alternate days so it wouldn’t be a problem. We knew it wasn’t exactly ideal, but we didn’t think _the Hutt’s_ grandson could be that dangerous, right? I mean this is the man who keeps his own brother on the sidelines! There was no possible way Katya or Laryssa could ever end up being involved with the _real_ mafia…

“Two months into the job, _Larushka_ came to me one day. She seemed really upset, so I sat her down and coaxed her to tell me what was wrong. She told me that the grandson, Mikael, had tried to force her to have sex with him, while she was leaving after putting his daughter to sleep one night, when his wife was away. She escaped, thankfully and the next day she told me that she would quit, when Katya told her he had done the same to her a few weeks ago, but she had been too scared to tell anyone.

“I asked them both if they wanted to tell their parents at all, but _Larushka_ completely refused. They said they would disown her. So…” Sasha breathed in deeply, “I took them to the police office myself. And made a report.”

“Did they do anything?”

Sasha scoffed, “No, of course they didn’t do anything, Detective Kira. And now I wish I hadn’t reported it after all… seeing as they disappeared a week later… and now…” Sasha looked outside the window facing her desk, tears swimming in her eyes.

Rey leaned forward in her chair and placed her hand softly over Sasha’s, “Thank you, for telling me.”

The woman sniffed, “Please,” she clutched Rey’s hand, tears falling down her cheeks, “Please. Bring them the justice they deserve, Detective. Those poor girls…” Sasha sobbed, “they deserved so much better…”

“I know, Sasha, I know…” Rey whispered, holding the woman’s hand for a few minutes longer.

When she stood up to leave, Sasha raised up her hand gesturing for her to wait, as she wrote something down on a piece of paper in front of her. “Here,” she said, handing her the paper, an address neatly scribbled on it, “This is the address where _Larushka’s_ parents are holding a funeral service for her and Katya, tomorrow. You should come too. Bring your friend along if you want,” she tucked her brown hair behind her ear nervously.

“Thank you very much. I’ll try to be there,” Rey smiled at her and made to leave, remembering one last thing, “Oh, and I had a question to ask…”

“Yes?”

“It’s a trivial thing but, why do you call Laryssa _, Larushka_?”

The woman raised an eyebrow, “You’re not from around here, are you?”

 _Dammit_ , Rey thought _, why did I ask that?_ “No, I’m not,” she tried to laugh it off, “I’m from Riga. It’s a city in Latvia. We have _quite_ a different dialect over there.”

“Ah I see…” Sasha responded, bemused, “Well, Russian people often use small suffixes to indicate our affection for someone _. Ushka_ , is one of them.” She paused, then, looking thoughtfully out the window again, “Laryssa was… a great kid. If I had a daughter, I’d want her to be like _Larushka_. May she rest in peace.”

“May she rest in peace,” Rey repeated after her, leaving the woman to reflect on the conversation they had just had.

* * *

 

Rey had told Kylo the entire story on the drive back home.

When they reached the loft again, finally, night had fallen, and their bones ached, from days of exhaustion, and their heads throbbed from the excruciating mental stress, the events of the day, the gruesome display of the children’s bodies playing over and over in their heads like a malfunctioning cassette.

All they wanted to do now, was sleep.

But sleep wasn’t really an option, _not yet anyway_ , Rey thought, not while the beacon continued beeping on that _fucking_ monitor, that made Rey want to smash her own head (or someone else’s) into a brick wall.

And as much as he wanted to head to his room, and close the door behind him, letting his body fall on the soft mattress below, Kylo knew that he could not. Unwillingly he made his way back to his wooden desk, his awful leather chair, that was too small for his back and didn’t support it fully which made his back ache all the more after hours and hours of sitting there doing absolutely nothing, when he noticed Rey’s soft hand on his shoulder.

“You should go to sleep,” she said.

“We still have to monitor the-”

“I’ll do that. You go to sleep, alright?”

“What about you?”

“I slept for two hours in the morning, so I’ll be fine for a while.”

“Just, don’t get too tired alright. Don’t let me sleep too late. If you have to sleep, just wake me up.”

“I will.”

Kylo turned to head to his room, when he heard Rey say, “Oh and Kylo?”

“Yes?”

“Sasha, the teacher we talked to today?”

“What about her?”

“She invited us to their funeral tomorrow morning. At around 8 am.”

“Alright,” he said, as he headed to his room.

“Don’t do anything stupid, okay?” Kylo added as an afterthought, just before closing the door to his room.

“I won’t.”

He wished he could have noticed how unconvincing she sounded, then. If only he hadn’t been so tired, he might have.

Because she had made up her mind, the _moment_ she had seen those bodies.

She had made up her mind, that she would slaughter every single man who had laid a finger on those children, before the night was over.

* * *

 

Rey walked through the hotel doors in the most revealing dress she could find in her closet, a backless, blue satin one, one side of which was longer than the other and reached till her ankles, the front had crisscross wires down the bodice that revealed her mostly flat chest and her thin physique. The dress clung to her body more tightly than she would have wanted in any practical scenario, making her bony figure and her muscled abdomen and thighs all the more apparent.

It was not the most uncomfortably revealing and embarrassing dress she had ever worn, having been forced into much more disgraceful scenarios by her _trusted_ guardian, _Admiral Holdo_ , but it concealed enough that she could easily pack two magazines of ammunition, a 9mm Smith and Wesson pistol in her bodice, and two M9 bayonets in each of the blue satin sleeves that reached down till her wrists.

The receptionist who sat in the hotel lobby, looked up upon hearing the _click clack_ of Rey’s tall black heeled shoes against the marble tiles, but did not seem surprised in the least on seeing her. “Are you here for the Plutt suite?” he asked her presumptuously.

 _This is going to be easy_ , Rey smiled to herself, “Yes,” she replied to him, as he took off a key from the hooks on the wall behind him and handed it to her. “Suite 105,” he stated blandly, going back to whatever Rey must have interrupted him from on his computer. There was a reason why _the Hutt_ kept Unkar on the sidelines, but it couldn’t have been more blatantly apparent than the carelessness with which the receptionist had handed her the keys to his suite. But still, the respect the Mafia commanded dictated that no one had the power to touch them, even if they went around recklessly purchasing guns, alcohol and prostitutes.

And no one would have dared touch them now, either, after they had so brutally raped and murdered two innocent young girls… well, no one with much of a care for their life anyway.

Everyone knew that no matter how secretively you did anything in Russia, no matter in which back alley of which god-forsaken town in this claustrophobic country, the Mafia would always, _always_ , hear about it.

Which is why, Rey wasn’t even trying to hide herself. They were going to find out who did it anyway, who killed their family _._

_She **wanted** them to know._

She told herself, that she was just doing it to find the list, to find the floppy disk and finish the mission they had been on for nearly three months now. And that was what she was going to tell Kylo, when he would eventually find out… sooner or later. But she was lying to herself, that much she knew.

She **_wanted_** to kill them, a murderous violent passion she hadn’t felt since that night Lucas -Luke (she still ended up correcting herself sometimes, even after so many years) - had left her.

She could hear the sounds of their uproarious laughter when the elevator doors opened with a ding arriving on the fourth floor. The first thing she noticed was the overwhelmingly thick smell of cigarettes, Vodka and sex, that seemed to linger on the entire floor, making her cough involuntarily. There were only two grand suites on this floor, one presumably empty, seeing from the lack of commotion from the left side of the hallway, and the other occupied by the very men she was here to kill.

Adjusting the bodice of her dress, she slipped out her 9mm pistol and one of the two rounds of ammunition she had brought with her, inserting the magazine into the handgun, pulling back the slide, clicking the bullet into place.

Tucking the hand that held the gun behind her back, she knocked on their door as politely as she could manage.

“ _Mikael, did you invite any others today?_ ” she heard a man say from the outside, a young woman’s giggles following his statement.

“ _No, I swear it wasn’t me, Sheila… you know I have eyes only for you…_ ” the man in question replied.

“Go away, _you fuckers_ , we didn’t order any room service!” a man bellowed from the inside, a loud snort accompanying his curses, as she heard him walk towards the door and violently open it, “I said we didn’t order any-” he began, stopping himself when he saw Rey standing in the doorway.

Mid-forties, Rey judged at first glance, from the man’s graying receding hairline, the wrinkles on his fat sagging cheeks, and his drooping eyes, that lingered too long on the crisscross wires across her breasts and assessed her body from head to toe like a hawk eyeing a piece of meat.

She imagined if he had looked at those girls’ the same way, the sickening bastard; and when she did, all sense of remorse or guilt, or reason for that matter, left her, as she raised her handgun to his forehead, and pulled the trigger.

It wasn’t that she hadn’t fired a gun before.

She had fired more than she would have liked to in her lifetime.

But she had never felt this overwhelming sense of raw sheer satisfaction and pure unadulterated… _joy,_ at having someone’s blood splattered across her eyes, watching their skulls explode and their bodies thump to the ground, as she stepped over their lifeless corpse.

The suite erupted in a blur of commotion, men still too intoxicated or stoned to be able to fully take in the scene before their eyes. In fact, Rey couldn’t exactly tell if she was sober either, the high of taking someone else’s life, someone who _deserved_ it, filling her with this delicious feeling of justice being served at _her_ hand.

Two more men sat leisurely on the couch, credit cards in hand, parting up rows of cocaine, and Rey didn’t hesitate pointing her guns at them, the bullet piercing their skulls, their brains sprayed on the yellow couch they sat on and the _pure white_ walls behind them.

A man jumped at her from the side hallway, Rey dodged his attack, shooting him once, twice in the stomach, and using him as a shield to the shots that were now being fired in her direction from the other room. Rey shot at him too, hitting him in the shoulder, another one hitting him in the eye, and he collapsed back. The man she was holding by the shoulder, struggled against her iron grasp, twisting a knife from the inside of his jacket and jabbing her with it; Rey jumped back instinctively, anticipating the attack, shooting at him, one bullet hitting the wall behind him and another finding its destined target in the man’s forehead.

 _Five down_ , she counted, keeping score, each new victim an imaginary tally mark inside her head.

A woman screamed from the room at the end of the hallway, and Rey ran towards the sound. The giant glass windows inside the room bathed it in a blue neon glow, revealing its trashed state, the broken furniture and the shattered glasses, crunching under her heavy steps; a man stood in the center of the chaos, a half-naked woman held tightly under the grip of his elbow, a stainless steel straight razor at her neck.

She recognized him immediately, from his beautifully youthful features, quite the stand-out from the rest of his family, his white blonde hair, the bangs of which slightly covered his eyes, his chiseled jaw, and the unfazed unperturbed sly smile he always wore, even now, at the end of the barrel of her handgun.

 _This_ , was the man she had been looking for.

 _This_ , was Mikael Plutt.

“Please… help me…” the woman begged beneath his hold, trembling with fear.

“Yes, yes, go on and help the poor woman, _suka_ ,” the man said, his voice still perfectly calm.

If she shot him then, he would kill the woman, Rey analyzed, slice open her carotid artery with his razor. Would she then be any better than them, they who so cruelly and inhumanely brutalized innocents, with nothing but their own selfish agenda on their mind?

As satisfying as it would have been to shoot the man at first sight, Rey prioritized the woman’s life before the man’s death, and held up her hands, rotating her gun freely around her finger, so that the barrel pointed towards her now. Slowly she slid down in front of him, cutting her knee on the shards of glass that littered the marble floor.

“Now, slide it here,” he ordered, loosening his grip over the woman’s neck.

Rey slid the handgun across the floor towards him, and he pushed away the woman to reach for the gun, raising it up to aim at his assailant, he pulled the trigger.

What he didn’t know was that she had already used her last bullet on his dear old comrades lying dead back in the hall.

“You fucking bitch-” he began, about to lunge at her with his straight razor ready to inflict injury, but Rey pulled out her two sharpened bayonet knives from each of her sleeves, one in each hand, slicing across his face, gouging out his eyes, as he screamed in pain. His hand dropped his razor to clutch his right eye, and Rey took the opportunity to twist the man’s other hand around his back, pushing him back, a knife to his throat, until he hit the glass windows of the room.

“You are going to pay for this, you _cunt_! Wherever you go, my _bratva_ will find you. And they will end you, and everyone you have ever loved-”

“Shut the fuck up!” Rey shouted at him, in English this time, and the man stilled, “American, eh?” the man commented, “You’ll be a much better treat for my family. They always love it when I bring an American home,” he laughed, the same unperturbed sadistic psychotic laugh, and Rey gritted her teeth, digging her knife just a little firmly into his neck, drawing blood. His breathing quickened, yet he did not move.

“Where is it?” Rey asked him curtly.

“Where is what-”

Rey banged his head against the window, a slight crack appearing in the delicate glass, “The disk, you fucker! Where is it?”

He laughed again and Rey pressed her knife deeper into his throat, making him laugh coldly, “I’m not telling you a thing.”

“You will tell me, or you will die a most horrible death, you pig.”

“Well, then, I will die a most horrible death,” he told her, calm and composed as ever, his sweet voice making her blood boil.

She kicked him in his right leg, he fell to the floor, his teeth hitting the metal slabs of the windows. With one hand she held him against the wall, and with the other she flattened the palm of his hand across the floor, her knife raised at the junction of his hand and his index finger.

“Tell me where it is,” she growled.

“Never,” he laughed.

The knife came down harder than she expected, offering a clean cut, slicing through the bone as if it were a piece of butter, severing the veins, arteries and nerves, slicing the member straight off. Blood spurted out from his hand where his finger was supposed to be, his scream echoing through the room, a resounding painful sound… and Rey found herself smiling.

“Where is it?”

“I… don’t need… to tell you anything…” he said, his breath coming in shorter now, “I will bleed out in four minutes… all I need to do is wait.”

“I’ll hack of another if you don’t tell me.”

“My hand is numb anyway. And I’ll just die quicker. So, by… all means… go ahead…”

Rey wanted to scream. She wanted to make him beg her to let him live, that was the only way she would feel satisfied in taking the life from him. She wanted him to beg like Laryssa must have begged him to _stop_. She wanted him to die feeling powerless, and afraid.

But no matter how many fingers she hacked off, or how many cuts she gave him, his body gave up before his tongue did, and she knew he would find his release in death any minute now, without ever telling her a single word.

She didn’t know when she gave up trying to talk to him, or when he stopped breathing altogether, his fingers bleeding out slowly and slowly until he crossed the point of no return.

The half-naked woman was still crouched in the corner of the room, whimpering softly, her head between her knees, trying not to look at the violent display before her. Rey checked the man’s pulse -cold, and dead – and stood up to walk towards the woman.

“Hey,” she whispered, “You need to leave this city you understand. If you wanna stay alive, leave the city and keep your head down for a little while. That’s all the help I can offer you.”

The woman opened her mouth to say something, but Rey was already stumbling back down the hallway, checking the men she had shot for their identities, the cocaine addicts, _Igor_ and _Ivan Plutt_ , the doorway man, _Vladimir_ , the shield, _Gavril_ and the hallway shooter –

_Unkar Plutt._

Rey walked back to the elevator, knowing Kylo would have found out where she is, from the disabling of the Unkar Plutt tracker. She couldn’t bring herself to care.

Down at the receptionist’s table, she gave him the same tip she’d given the woman upstairs. _Leave_ , she told him, _leave and don’t come back._

If the receptionist noticed the blood in her hair and some smeared across her face, he didn’t comment.

* * *

 

She changed into a comfortable t-shirt and jeans in the backseat of the car a few kilometers away from the hotel, dumping her blue dress, torn and bloodied now, into a dumpster by the side of the road. She washed her hair in a public bathroom nearby, rinsing the blood and dirt from her it and washing all traces of her crimes from her face.

When she reached home at around four am in the morning, she noticed the door to the loft was slightly ajar. She sighed, pulling it open, and entering, closing it behind her as softly as she could. The lights were all turned off in the room, the only source being the pale moonlight entering from the window.

Kylo was sat at his desk, a few feet from her, the monitor in his hands no longer beeping, his hair was disheveled, as if he had just woken up from his sleep (which he probably had), and he wore the same black t-shirt he had worn in the morning, now inside out.

“ _Where were you?_ ” he asked her, not looking at her, accentuating every word, the depth of his voice sending chills down her spine.

“You know where I was, Kylo.”

The suddenness with which he stood up, pushing back his chair, and walking towards her in long strides, covering the few feet between them, made her step back instinctively. She couldn’t exactly place the look in his eye, was it concern, or anger like she’d never seen before? A mixture of both, she concluded, that ended up making him look sad more than anything else.

“Are you out of your _fucking_ mind?” he stepped closer to her every second, “Do you have _any_ idea what you have just _done_?”

“I’m not a child, Kylo! I know what this means-”

“Oh _, do you_? Do you, really? Then why would you do something,” he shook his head, “ _so fucking stupid_ , Rey! Why? You think this is it, you killed a bunch of their men, and you won’t hear from them again? How could you be so stupid, Rey? You know they know _everything_ that happens in this city,” he stepped closer still, one more step and she’d be pinned between him and the wall, “They own the police, the military, the public, across the Soviet Union and all the way to East Germany!” his voice rose in volume with every word, “You think, they will let you go? You think you have _anywhere_ , on the entire _fucking_ planet, to run to after this, after what _you_ ’ve just done?”

Kylo stared at her, eyes full of panic and anger, and hurt, but she stared back, “Well. Do you?” he questioned, and Rey could only shake her head.

“It was the right thing to do, Kylo.”

“Oh, the _right_ thing!” he threw his arms up, “Even if it gets you a fucking death sentence!?”

“You know they wouldn’t have done anything, you heard what the police said, they – the girls - they would go un-avenged.”

“Are you a _fucking_ child?” he pinned her between his arms and the wall behind her, “With your _fucking_ justice mantra and avenging-the-wronged agenda? Will you at least listen to yourself? What, you planning to become a vigilante now? _What_ do you think you have changed today by killing a bunch of low-lives and endangering your own life? Have you stopped the rapes and killings of children and young girls across the planet, the country, _hell_ , this very city? You think there aren’t more Laryssa’s and Katya’s around every corner of every city in this goddamn country?”

“I know they are!” Rey shouted back, “I’m not a child! But sometimes in life, you have to pick a fight and-”

“And _this_ is the fight you picked, Rey, a fight you can’t even win?”

“No one else would fight for them, alright?” they were both shouting now, “Not their teachers, not their parents, not their friends _. No one_. And if I have the power to fight this battle on this day, and on _only_ this day, and if I refuse still, then am I really any better at all than the people who turned their backs on these children, who denied them their true justice? This is a fight I picked ** _. I picked it_**. Not you, not anyone else, and I’m not putting anyone else into this fight either. I picked it, because it was the only right thing to do!”

“You didn’t pick a fight, Rey. You waged a fucking war.”

“Aren’t you listening to me? **_I. Don’t. Care._** I don’t care if they kill me on the street tomorrow, I don’t care if I don’t live to fight them _any_ other day. I _chose_ this fight, I picked it. So, if come tomorrow, they kill me, then I can only hope _somebody_ else will pick **_mine_**!” she finished saying, exhausted and breathless.

Kylo stared at her, finding himself at a loss for words. Her eyes were swimming with tears again, threatening to fall down, that she tried but failed to blink away, ever the strong soldier. He sighed, looking down at his feet, then looking up at her. He reached his hand forward to cup her cheek, his large palm enveloping the right side of her face entirely, while the other half was lit by a tiny sliver of moonlight that slipped past the window, the light illuminating the beautiful brown of her irises and the dark freckles across her skin. He rubbed his thumb across her cheek and she let her eyes close, resting her face in his hand, letting the tears fall.

“You’re so _fucking_ stupid,” he said, wrapping his arms around her shoulders and pulling her in close, embracing the small woman for the second time that day.

* * *

 

The funeral service was incredibly moving, and Rey left it feeling like she now knew the girls a lot better, if not as a friend, then as a distant acquaintance, at least. She found out that Katya had a little sister, a beautiful young girl of thirteen years of age, with the family’s characteristic blonde locks, and rosy cheeks. Her eyes were red and puffy and she gave a speech so innocent and heart-wrenching that only a younger sibling could give. The parents were less emotional than the girl, giving a speech much more formal and eloquent than the little girl’s cries to ‘ _bring her sister back_ ,’ though the father too could not contain his emotions for long, bursting into tears as soon as he stepped off the podium.

The parents of both the girls invited some guests, Sasha included, to their home a short drive away from the funeral parlor. Sasha insisted that Rey and Kylo accompany her as well, which is why they now found themselves seated comfortably on a sofa at Laryssa’s house. Sasha had introduced the two of them to the rest of the family, as close friends of hers, though Kylo knew it wasn’t exactly a sound idea, mingling with the locals to this extent, considering the happenings of yesterday.

Laryssa’s father had just finished telling them the story of how Laryssa first got into playing the piano, when her mother stood up, asking her guests if anyone knew how to play the piano, and if they would be so kind to play something to honor her memory.

To Rey’s surprise, and everyone else’s, the six feet tall man sitting beside her unexpectedly and awkwardly stood up, volunteering.

The grand piano seemed like the most expensive item in the Nikitovich household, something that Rey was sure, that now that Laryssa had passed away, would gather dust, without having a player to play its keys, amounting to nothing but a piece of furniture that would only serve to remind her parents of her loss every day. But it was an exquisite instrument though, a grand structure, pitch black, until Kylo lifted open the fall, the shiny ivory keys coming into view. Sunlight slipped past the blinds on the opposite window, leading to the terrace, falling on Kylo’s formal black jacket, illuminating only half his face.

Rey recognized the tune from the first few keys he played, the melancholy of the piece seeping into her very soul; she had always loved “ _Lacrimosa_ ” as a child, when Maz used to play it on the record player sometimes. Though since those early memories of her childhood, she had always associated that song with sadness and sorrow, with death and despair. A fitting choice for the occasion, she concluded.

Kylo played the piano with such finesse, his fingers ghosting over the keys with such elegance and grace she thought he might have been classically trained. The twists and turns of the tune made her heart leap in her chest with every key he pressed down. But his expression was a mystery to her, his eyes were too focused on the keys before him even though he was playing perfectly, carefully pressing down each one, but passionlessly, without really feeling the music. His hair, though it reached till his neck, didn’t move an inch from its place, his body was still, only his fingers moved over the keyboard, even his breath didn’t hitch when playing a particularly difficult note. He looked so captivatingly beautiful… yet, Rey couldn’t help but feel that he seemed too sad. One could not imagine what he could possibly have gone through in his life to be so unfeeling to music anymore.

When he finished playing the piece, his audience clapped slowly, and Laryssa’s grandmother, a short thin woman dressed in a colorful scarf and red _sarafan_ , held his hand for a while, kissing it, thanking him for his performance. Kylo could only smile awkwardly, making his way back to Rey’s side. After a few more stories from some of Laryssa’s and Katya’s friends, the audience dissipated, some going to the other room to offer a prayer for the dead, and some heading over to the dining room, leaving Rey and Kylo the only two people in the living room after their departure.

Rey stood up, moving to the windows and pulling them wide open. The house was located in the greenest part of Saint Petersburg, Rey had seen yet, and it was a sunny day today so the view from the window was of lush pine trees forming the border of the street they were located on, their leaves shining from the rare appearance of the sun in March. She rummaged through her pockets for her lighter and her pack of cigarettes when Kylo caught her hand. “Don’t.” he pleaded her, and for possibly the first and only time, she listened.

“Do you know what the lyrics to Lacrimosa are?” Rey asked him after a while.

“Uh… No, I don’t think I do.”

Rey turned her frame to look at him. “ _Full of tears will be that day, when from the ashes will rise, the guilty man to be judged._ ”

Kylo scoffed. And Rey followed him, laughing whole-heartedly, letting the simple pleasure of laughter rip through her, “You certainly picked a piece fit for the occasion.”

“I didn’t know what the lyrics were,” he smiled at her.

“Hey, Kylo?”

“Hmm…?”

“Kylo… isn’t… your _real_ name, is it?”

He breathed in deeply, “No, no, it isn’t.”

“What is it, then?”

“Ben.”

“Ben what?”

“Ben….” He paused, having not said or heard his old name in over twenty years, “Solo. Ben Solo.”

Rey smiled, “I like it. Ben… Ben is a good name,” she rolled the name around on her tongue, seeing how it fit with the appearance of the man before her, “Ben…. _ushka_.”

All of a sudden, the man before her stilled, his body freezing.

 

_Echoes of a man’s gruffy voice repeating Benushka, resounded in his head, as they strolled down a lane in the snow, hand in hand, but the memory melded itself quickly into one where he felt such sheer and absolute terror he could not breathe. The memories all merged together, inseparable, incomprehensible, incoherent. His ears started ringing, and he clutched them tightly to stop the noise echoing within his own head._

 

“Wha- what did you say?” he managed in a strangled voice.

“Kylo! Kylo! Are you alright?” His ears kept ringing.

 

_“Do you deny it? Do you deny it? Do you deny it?” Snoke’s whispers taunted him, over and over and over again, the same question playing on a loop._

_“You father was a Nazi… and your mother was a whore…” the man continued saying. Or was he screaming? Everything felt so loud under the water._

_“Benushka…” a menacing voice whispered, the notes of a piano playing quietly in the background, people are singing, he’s clapping along to the music…._

_“Promise me…” a voice whispered, “Promise me, Benushka…” He had a kind smile, though there were tears in his eyes, and he hugged him so tightly he felt like there were needles pricking at his lungs._

_No. That was the water._

_“Nyet,” a boy screamed (was it him?). The light blinded him. He was back in his chair._

_“Do you deny it?” he taunted him, his mouth opening in a menacing smile, the rows and rows of blackening teeth greeting him, ready to rip open his throat, and tear him limb from limb._

 

“Ben! _Benushka!”_ she whispered, a cheek on his hand, and the ringing stopped.

Slowly she helped him stand up again, he grabbed at the guard-rail for support. “I’m sorry-” he began, but she cut him off, “It’s alright,” she spoke softly, being no stranger to her fair share of violent visions and disturbing dreams.

When he spoke again, his throat was dry, “What did you say before?”

“Oh… that…” Rey exclaimed, her cheeks reddening, “Sasha taught me that. She said Russians often add a suffix to the name of their fri-”

“No, I know that. Of course, I know that. _Why_ did you call me that?” Kylo turned his frame around to face her.

“Well… we _are_ friends, aren’t we?”

Kylo looked at her, dumb-founded, as if he didn’t quite understand the meaning of the word, and in a large capacity he did not, but then his expression warmed and he smiled at her, a shy soft smile, that didn’t quite reach his eyes.

“Yeah,” he nodded, “I suppose you could say we are.”

His replying expression made her heart clench.

“What did the world do to you?” she asked him, “That you can’t even smile without looking sad?”

He wanted to answer her, tell her something, _anything_ , but found himself speechless once again.

For how could he tell her that he didn’t even remember?

He didn’t reply, and she didn’t ask him again, deciding that she didn’t need an answer to her question after all.

Because he was _kind_.

And _that_ was enough for her.


	6. Breathe

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The first Pink Floyd song of the series! And when it's Pink Floyd... you know it's gonna be a heavy one ;) [Listen here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R49d4f5sEs4)  
> Follow me on Tumblr [here](https://melodyoftheriver.tumblr.com/) at melodyoftheriver  
> Follow my fantastic beta reader [here](http://whutotthewhut.tumblr.com/) at whutotthewhut. You won't regret it :)

** East Berlin, May 1988 **

The man he was looking for was sitting by himself at the counter, swirling around the golden-brown whiskey in his cup, and listening to the chinking of the ice cubes against the glass. All while purposefully ignoring the beautiful blonde bartender who was trying desperately to get his attention in hopes of a generous tip. The jukebox placed in the far corner of the bar, probably the last of its kind in Berlin, played the same jazzy song it always played at this hour of night: an old tune from the 1950s that Poe didn’t recognize, or particularly enjoy. There were only a handful of customers sitting at the counter, a few white-collar, middle-age men clad in suits, even fewer were seated on the luxury sofas that had been set up throughout the room. Business was slow on a weekday, the only customers being tired, old alcoholics, or information brokers, like the very man Poe was here to meet.

“Don’t tell me you listen to this crap,” Poe said as he approached the man, referring to the dull saxophone that continued playing in the background.

The man groaned, taking a swig from his drink, downing the liquid in one gulp, “I’ll listen to whatever I goddamn like, alright,” he replied curtly, raising his hand up in the air to signal the bartender for another refill. “You’re late,” he said, his thick Russian accent clearly evident from his harshly rolled _r’s_ and blunt _v’s_ , especially against Poe’s soft, calm German one.

The man turned to look at Poe, knitting his eyebrows suspiciously; Poe wasn’t stupid enough to wear his military uniform to a meeting with an information broker, especially not with a Russian one, and especially not in this part of the city, even though it was required of him at all times outside, at least in the premises of the capital. It wasn’t that risky really, NPA officers were always being found outside of their mandatory uniforms, often being discovered trying to woo some woman in some back corner of some rarely-frequented clubs and bars, by a subordinate with a grudge. The consequences were a joke, honestly, since not many abided by the rule anyway and if discovered, one could easily bribe one’s way out of it. The man’s inquisitive look made Poe un-easy. Was there some _tell_ about him that could blow his cover, he wondered, but decided not to dwell on the subject too long lest he seem suspicious.

“Ah, sorry ‘bout that, mate,” he managed, in his most cheerful voice, “You know how work is.”

“No, actually. I don’t know how work is,” the man replied, the bartender slowly filling his cup with more whiskey, “You’ve not told me the first thing about yourself. I’ve helped you how many times now? Thirteen, fourteen times? Not once has my information been incorrect. And yet, you _still_ don’t trust me.”

Poe chuckled, turning his frame towards the bartender, “Can I have a glass of wate-” he began, seating himself beside the man.

“Ugh. Just bring him a glass of whiskey, alright,” the man addressed the girl, cutting Poe off. The woman rolled her eyes, going back to the cabinet to replace her now empty bottle of whiskey with a new one. She removed an Old-Fashioned glass from the deck, rubbing it clean with the cloth she had slung over her shoulder, and placed it in front of him. Twisting open the bottle cap, she poured some of the drink into his glass, dropping two cubes of ice into the cup with a clink.

“We had a deal,” Poe spoke softly, “You won’t ask who I am, and I won’t ask who you are. You’ll keep giving me the information I need and I’ll keep paying you. What part of that doesn’t sound like a fair bargain to you, hmm?’

He raised the cup to his lips, taking a sip; the soft amber liquid belied its harsh taste, the whiskey burned on the way down, and Poe winced. He never could hold his liquor.

“The part where you still know every single thing about me, despite never asking?”

Poe sighed. “Are you unhappy with the amount I pay you, then?”

The man set his glass back down with a harsh thud. “You know how many people would like to know who is selling the Americans confidential mafia secrets? You know how many people would like that person’s head to be served to them on a silver platter? I stick my neck out for you,” he jabbed a finger at him, “ _every. Day._ And you won’t even tell me _what_ I’m doing it for?”

“I’ll tell you what you’re doing it for,” Poe said, voice still calm, unfazed by the man’s outburst. He set his glass back down and turned his face to look at the man’s frightened eyes. “You _want_ your wife to stop working as a cleaning lady to make extra cash every day. You want there to be enough food on your table every night. For there to be no more power outages, no more forced evictions at three in the morning, no more working for the Plutts as their guard dog in the East. What you _want_ , is for your daughter to have that spinal surgery she needs, something you will only find _West of the Wall_ , a place _I_ can get you to. So, my question is, are you still unhappy with the amount I pay you?”

“What will I do if they find out?” the man said, panic lingering in his voice, seemingly unsatisfied by the other’s explanation.

“Well. Have they found out yet?”

“No, but-”

“And who do you think is taking care of that for you?”

The man stared at him, speechless. Poe grinned.

“Honestly, after all these years, I expected you to have at least a little trust in me!” he chuckled, closing his eyes and gulping down his glass of whiskey in one breath, coughing slightly as he set the glass back down on the counter, “The only way they are ever going to find out, is if _you_ tell them. Alright? As long you _don’t_ do that, you will be fine.”

The man beside him turned back to his drink, gulping down the last few drops, and then tiredly letting his head slump down onto the cold marble counter.

“So. What have you got for me this time?” Poe asked him.

The man sighed, closing his eyes. “They’re having a trade.”

“When?”

“A week from now. Outside the Soviet Embassy. Eduard Shevardnadze, the Soviet foreign minister, is coming for a visit.  They’ll use the protests as a cover-up.”

“What are they trading?”

“You know that list I told you about a few months ago,” the man said, Poe nodded, “Well, there are a bunch of defected spies who are willing to pay good money to see that it is destroyed. They made an offer to one of _the Hutt’s_ children to trade it for five hundred, maybe, six hundred million rubles…”

Poe’s eyes widened. “Really?” he asked, incredulously.

The man rolled his eyes at him. “That’s all I know.”

“Oh, trust me _. That…_ is a lot.”

“I’m glad _you’re_ happy,” the man moaned miserably, as Poe made to get up from his seat, placing two one Mark notes beneath his now-empty glass of whiskey.

“I’ll see you next time, alright, brother.”

“I sure as hell hope not.”

Poe chortled and made his way towards the door. He was just about to leave, when the man called back to him.

“Hey, listen,” he said quietly, as Poe pulled open the exit door, “You know that someone killed six of their family members a few months back, right?”

“I do.”

“Do you know who did it?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Is that the truth?”

“Yes,” Poe replied, “Yes, it is.”

His voice sounded genuine to the man, he couldn’t distinguish any lies in his statement, “Alright then,” he mumbled, turning back to his glass, “you be careful now.”

“I will,” he said, as he turned back, stepping out into the cold East Berliner air.

* * *

 

He punched his number on the dialing pad of a filthy little telephone box a few miles away from the bar. An operator picked it up.

“Thank you for calling Clarke and Amy’s VCR repair shop, how may I help you?” a cheerful voice asked him.

“Agent Poe Dameron,” Poe replied calmly, German accent now almost completely gone, “The clocks are striking thirteen,” he added before the woman had a chance to ask.

The operator paused for a moment, considering the man’s request, then said, “If you will just wait for a little while, we will redirect your call shortly! Thank you!”

The on-hold music put him more on edge than he already was. He leaned back against the dirty transparent walls of the booth, picturing the young woman who attended his call, surrounded by wires and electronic sets, sitting in her dark little underground call center, plugging in different wires in search of a secure line while he listened patiently to the dull tune. It was taking longer than usual, he noticed, his fingers tapping softly to the music, on top of the metallic telephone set.

The music ended abruptly, his fingers ceased. A familiar voice called out his name.

 

“Poe?” he whispered to him, “Poe, are you there?”

“Yeah. It’s me. I’m here,” he breathed his reply into the receiver, closing his eyes with the hand-set pressed tightly against his cheek. He could hear Finn sigh softly on the other side.

“I don’t have a lot of time,” Poe told him, “So I’ll be quick. The Russian Mafia is trading off the disc. At the Embassy, when Shevardnadze visits. A bunch of defectors have agreed to buy it for about 600 million rubles. That’s as much as I know.”

Poe could hear Finn scribbling on a piece of paper on the other side, “That’s good intel, Poe,” he paused, reluctant to let the conversation end so soon, “I’ll pass it on.” Poe didn’t miss how his voice lingered on the last syllable a little too long.

“I have to go now,” Finn said.

Poe didn’t want him to.

He wanted to cry. To scream. To tell him something. _Anything._

“Right,” is all he said.

He pressed down on the button and hung up the phone, having said everything that he had _needed_ to say, and absolutely nothing at all at the same time, placing the beeping receiver back on the telephone stand with a _tring._

After the beeping stopped, and the little space of the booth was quiet once again, Poe stayed there for a few more minutes, eyes closed, head resting against the wall, if only to savor the sound of _his_ voice that echoed in his head, before it would once again disappear for months to come.

When he opened his eyes again and wiped away the tears that strained down his cheeks, he smoothed out his jacket over his shoulders. Pushing open the door to the telephone box with a jerk, he wrapped his jacket tighter around himself, and walked back home in silence.

 

* * *

 

“Goddammit,” Kylo winced, shooting Rey an annoyed look, as she stepped on his foot for the fifth time in the last fifteen minutes.

“Sorry,” Rey laughed nervously, uncomfortably aware of Kylo’s long slender fingers resting softly at her shoulder, as he leaned on it to pick up the phone. She could feel a warm blush rising up her cheeks, her ears reddening at the simple contact.

A six-foot-four-inches tall man, and a five-feet tall woman crammed into the little space inside the telephone box was _definitely_ not a good idea, to say the least.

Rey’s knee would nudge against Kylo’s groin every time she leaned forward to angle the receiver towards herself, making Kylo hiss in pain, and Kylo’s elbow would hit Rey in the nose every time he checked his watch, something, she noticed, he had a habit of doing every few minutes, much to her annoyance. On top of all that, the little booth was absolutely filthy, with dried bubblegum and various body fluids lining the internal walls. Neither of them quite fancied getting urine stains on their jackets, so they had huddled in close to each other to avoid their backs scraping against the walls.

The American on the phone did not say hello, before he started detailing the objectives of their mission. Rey and Kylo listened patiently until the man finished, Kylo’s expression becoming more and more perplexed as the conversation proceeded.

“What I don’t get,” he argued, “is _why_ they are auctioning off a list, they only just bought off an auction themselves? This doesn’t make sense.”

The man on the other side sighed, “I don’t know,” he said, “That’s just what I’ve been told.”

“The Soviet Embassy, huh?” Kylo replied, “An odd place for the mafia to have an exchange… are you _sure_ about this?”

“They’ll probably use the protests to hide themselves. I sent Rey the names and faces of all the spies on our wanted list, so keep an eye out for them, alright?”

“Yes, yes, we know,” Rey exclaimed exasperatedly, leaning forward, stepping on Kylo’s foot again.  The man inhaled sharply, and Rey shot him an apologetic look.

“You’re heavy, you know that?” he whispered, through the gritted teeth. Rey rolled her eyes, trying to suppress her satisfied smile.

“Our mission is only to retrieve the disc, right, Finn?” Rey asked, angling the receiver towards herself.

“Yes, that is correct,” Finn replied, “You are not to engage with the Russian Mafia under any circumstances. Especially not after the recent killings in their family…” the man trailed off.

Rey and Kylo glanced at each other, an unspoken question passing between them. _Do they know?_ Their eyes seemed to say.

“The CIA doesn’t want to be any more involved with the Mafia’s shit than they already are. Neither does the KGB, I presume, from what Holdo’s told me. One of our agents killing someone from the Mafia would bring a shit-storm down on us all, the likes of which the FBI hasn’t seen yet. And we don’t want the Russians to accuse us of trying to kill their Foreign Minister either. So, your job,” he said, “is to extract the disc, without any bloodshed _at all_. That includes the two of you as well,” he added, almost as an after-thought.

“We’ll try to stay alive, then,” Rey said, “But right now, we have to leave. Shevardnadze’s flight lands in five hours.”

“Oh, just wait a moment, okay,” Finn said, and Rey heard him shuffling through some papers on the other side, “If you ever get into any trouble… go to this address, alright? Do you have a pen?”

Rey’s eyes glanced over to Kylo’s questioningly. The man shrugged, “Why would I have one? You’re the one with all the tapes…” he whispered.

Rey rolled her eyes, rummaging through the contents of her jacket, and after a few seconds her hands found a half-finished barely-sharpened lead pencil and a plastic cassette container in one of her deep pockets. She licked the pencil, and lifting open the container, removed the paper that indicated the name of album under the image of triangular prism splitting light into its colors, _The Dark Side of The Moon_.

“This will have to do,” she sighed, and begrudgingly noted down the address, as Finn narrated it, on the back of the paper that listed all the tracks.

“Alright, then,” Finn exhaled, pausing ominously, “Be careful, now.”

“Always am,” Rey said confidently, tucking the pencil and the tape back into her pocket, and beside her Kylo chuckled. The call disconnected and Rey placed the receiver back on the stand, leaving the tiny booth quiet once again.

The two of them seemed to realize it at the same time; Kylo’s breath tickled her face every time he exhaled and Rey noticed that her hand was placed softly on his chest. The awkwardness of the situation was not lost to either of them, as they untangled themselves, Kylo forcing open the door with his elbow, and stepping out.

The car was parked not far away from the telephone booth, and the two walked over to it in an almost uncomfortable silence until Kylo found the courage to break it.

“So. Where do you think he even gets his information?”

“Huh?” Rey looked up at him as they walked, “Who?” she asked.

“The American.”

“He has a name, you know,” Rey rolled her eyes at him.

“Right, Finn, whatever. Where do you think he gets his intel?” he asked again.

“Why do you expect _me_ to know?”

“I thought you two were friends. Aren’t you?”

“He’s my handler, Kylo. We are friendly, sure, but he doesn’t tell _me_ anything!”

“Oh,” Kylo nodded.

“Why are you asking?” Rey questioned, the black Mercedes they had rented a week ago, coming into view.

“Oh, nothing, really…. Something just… seems a little bit off about this. Don’t you think so?”

“In what way?” Rey pulled the handle, and the door to the passenger seat flew open, as Kylo went around the vehicle to the other side.

“This, doesn’t sound like something the Mafia would do at all…not for an exchange anyway…” he replied folding his arms over the roof.

Rey considered his doubts for a moment. “You’re probably just looking into it too much,” she said, “You give them a lot more credit that they deserve really,” she scoffed light-heartedly, “They’re all as dumb as nails, and I wouldn’t really worry too much.”

Kylo nodded in agreement slowly, turning his head to look at the passing cars on the highway in the distance.

“Shall we go now?” Rey asked softly, distracting Kylo from his contemplations.

He still couldn’t shake the feeling that something was a bit suspicious about the whole situation but decided to overlook his doubts for the time-being. It wasn’t like they had much of a choice in the matter, anyway.

“Yeah,” he murmured, pulling open his side of the door. Rey didn’t miss how his voice still sounded wholly unconvinced and just a little bit unsettled. Ignoring that fact, she stepped into the car, as Kylo turned the key around in the ignition, the two of them driving off the road and onto the highway, making their way to the Soviet Embassy.

 

* * *

 

“Your choice of artillery really is worrying, Kylo,” Rey remarked from the opposite end of the room, another cigarette balanced between her fingers, watching Kylo clean the long barrel of the gun with the bore brush, slowly assembling the pieces to his _Dragunov SVD-63_ sniper rifle.  Rey dismounted from the table she was sitting on, moving slowly towards the man, inspecting his work. Kylo looked up towards the girl, her eyes narrowed in a way that seemed to say, _“Really? This is the one you’re choosing?”._ The man chose not to indulge the girl or comment at her remark, opting instead to roll his eyes at her, shaking his head, and going back to the task at hand.

“What’s even the effective range of this thing, huh? Six hundred, maybe seven hundred meters?”

“Eight hundred actually,” Kylo huffed, “but I have taken shots up to eleven hundred.”

“Seriously, though, there are so many better rifles than this crap. What, in the world, possessed you to buy _this_ one?”

“It’s the first one I ever used, alright!” Kylo snapped, “And I get the longest-range shots with this one, so will you please shut up now and let me work?”

“Alright, alright,” Rey raised her hands up as an apology, “No need to get so touchy over your guns," she smirked. Kylo shook his head again, but she could see the corners of his lips curling upwards ever so slightly.

Rey walked over to the window, a tiny sliver of late afternoon sunlight escaping through, and parted the blinds just a little bit, to look down at the mayhem on the road three stories beneath them.

Rows and rows of people lined the street, their brightly colored posters and wooden protest signs in hand, eye-catching slogans hoisted up on big banners above their head. Their chants and songs were all one could hear in a two-mile radius, and the streets had all been so packed, Rey and Kylo had to park their car a couple hundred meters away from the Embassy. Ultimately, it was a good thing there were so many people gathered in front of it, or else a couple carrying two suspicious-looking heavy black duffle bags into an abandoned building directly facing the Embassy itself, would have been bound to raise more than a few eyebrows. Rey was surprised Kylo had found such a fantastic stake-out location, the third floor of an opposite building, barely furnished, just a few chairs and tables here and there, that had the view of not only the entire front entrance to the Embassy, but also of its surrounding few-hundred meters where the protest was decidedly at its loudest.

“We’re going to need someone on the ground too,” Rey changed the subject. “A sniper can’t find specific faces in this crowd, especially not with all the banners and posters covering them. Finn was right. They _are_ using the protest as a cover up. But they’re also hoping they will be able to hide among the crowd and make the exchange without anyone being able to place them at this location today.”

“What makes you say that? The Russian Mafia has never been one to bother with secrecy in their business.”

“The Russian Mafia, no. But the defectors, yes. These people have been underground for thirty, maybe forty years. Just look at all the cameras down there,” Rey said, “If any one of them was to snap a picture of them, you can be sure the CIA and the KGB would have it by midnight, tonight. And if they have that picture, then they’ll know what they currently look like-”

“And if they know what they currently look like,” Kylo chipped in, dragging back his chair to join Rey at the window, “they’ll give that photo over to every intelligence agency on the planet.”

“Exactly. That’s a whole planet’s worth of secret agents and assassins working to hunt them down,” she said. “The poor bastards won’t have anywhere left to run,” Rey sighed, a hint of sadness in her voice.

“Isn’t that what we’re supposed to ensure?” Kylo questioned her.

“No,” Rey looked up to meet the man’s eyes, “It isn’t right. It won’t just be them who will be dying, Kylo. Any families they have, any friends, they’ll wipe them all out to remove their existence from the world. These people aren’t just defectors, Kylo. They’re a living breathing proof that the system not only _can_ fail, but that the system _has_ failed. They’re hope for anyone who doesn’t believe in that system, that they too _can_ escape. And the CIA and the KGB can’t have that! They will try whatever it takes, to remove them from history like…” she took in a sharp breath, turning back to the window, “like scraping off blood from a crime scene.”

Kylo stared at her, a bewildered expression on his face. “I could report you for this, you know that, right?”

“I do,” she hummed, “Don’t think you will, though.”

He blinked at her, confused, “What makes you so certain?” he said, “We’ve know each other all of what? Five? Six months? You think you can trust me?”

“Trust… isn’t the right word, no,” she spoke after a little while, “It’s just… a feeling. You and I aren’t all that different after all.”

She turned away from the window, walking back towards the tiny wooden table, dozens of barrels, cartridges and scope rings sprawled across it, leaving the man to gaze outside the window at the protestors instead, listening quietly to their cheerful folk German songs.

 _What a strange woman_ , he smiled to himself.

They sat in comfortable silence for the next few minutes, slowly assembling the rifle laid out before them.

“So,” Rey asked him, when Kylo had set up the sniper rifle at the window, a stand with spiked feet hoisting up the heavy gun. "Have you decided?"

“Decide what?”

“Who’s going to go outside.” she answered him. “You up for a game of ‘Rock, paper, scissors’?” Rey chuckled. Kylo shot her a confused look. “Never mind,” she added.

“Well. Who has got the best sniper skills between the two of us?”

“Well, we can’t exactly have a match right now, unless we want a national security emergency with the Soviets blaming the Germans for an attempted assassination.”

He laughed, and Rey smiled at the sound, “Wouldn’t want that, that’s true.”

“I think _I_ should go.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, really. I’m small so I won’t attract any unwanted attention. Plus, I’ll blend right in with the crowd and everything.”

“True, you have the advantage in that regard.” Kylo replied, “We will need to communicate, though. However, these,” he held up the black walkie-talkies placed on the table, “don’t exactly _blend in_.”

“Never mind that,” she snatched one of them from his hand, “I’ll tuck it inside my jacket. No one’s gonna see it.”

“ _Mmm-hmm_ ,” he nodded, “I sure as hell hope not.”

“You keep an eye on the surroundings. And tell me if you see any one of those faces on those files.”

“Right.”

Rey picked up her jacket from the hooks on the opposite wall and slid her arms through the sleeves, tucking the walkie-talkie safely inside between her right arm and her side.

“Though I won’t be much for a conversation out there,” she commented before leaving.

“Why not?”

She flashed her walk-man at him as she left. Kylo groaned in disappointment, and Rey found herself grinning as she dismounted the uneven steps to the bottom-most floor of the building.

 

* * *

 

There was only one album in her pocket, anyway. _The Dark Side of the Moon_ by _Pink Floyd_ , the same one she had messily scribbled the address on to. She wasn’t really in the mood to listen to any psychedelic rock at the moment, but it was either that, or ‘ _Ninety-nine luftballoons’_ , playing for the ninety-ninth time over the excited voices of Germans shouting, “ _Make love, not war_ ” at the top of their lungs. Opening the plastic box that contained the cassette, she eyed the paper that noted the address distastefully. If there was anything she hated more than hippies or pretentious literature, it was ruining her cassette covers like this.

Rey placed the tape inside the walk-man, closing it shut with a click, surprisingly discovering it had been rewound this time. She slipped on her new pair of ear-on headphones, a simple black one she had found in a record store not long ago and hit play.

A heart was beating in her ears and her heart was beating in her chest; the sound of clocks being wound, papers being ripped, and a man’s eerie uncomfortable laughter played back and forth between her ear drums.

A loud blow threw her from her feet to the ground, a resounding deafening boom that ripped through the atmosphere, it tore through the starting track on the album playing in her ears. Her headphones slipped off slightly as the blinding flash from the explosion came into her view, a huge ball of varicolored fire belching upwards, leaving a series of smoke-rings to float slowly after it. The ground vibrated with the impact of the blast, the windows on the buildings on either side shattered violently, spraying them with thousands of pieces of glass and steel, a deadly rainfall. The building directly adjacent to the Embassy erupted in flames, a huge bite had been taken off the side and the roof of the building. The crowd around her erupted into chaos, children wailing and people running for their lives, scurrying to safety. There was a sharp ringing in Rey’s ears, and she was only barely aware of the man screaming at her from the walkie-talkie.

“Rey!” Kylo shouted, “Rey, I’ve lost you. Where are you?”

She groaned as she made to get up on her feet, her headphones tangling in the strands of her hair. “K-Kylo…” she mumbled, “What’s happen-”

Rey didn’t notice the sudden grip on her shoulder, the fingers that curled slowly around her waist. A knife met her flesh, ripping through the fabric of her leather jacket, shredding the skin beneath it, sinking deeper and deeper into her abdomen, spearing her guts from the inside. Vainly she gasped against the searing pain, but her breath wouldn’t come. As the knife rotated, the sound of her nerves and muscles being gouged grew louder. Without warning, her assailant shoved the blade all the way into her stomach, until the shiny metal disappeared beneath her broken skin.

“A present,” a rough Russian voice murmured behind her, twisting the black hilt inside her chest, “from the _bratva_.”  

Rey turned her head, staring bewilderedly into the man’s eyes, strikingly blue even against the setting sun, his blonde locks falling slightly over his face. He held the woman in place, knife buried deep inside her lung, reaching inside her jacket to remove the walkie-talkie.

“Tell your people the debt is paid,” he hissed into the receiver, “Don’t mess with the _bratva_ again.”

Rey could only faintly make out Kylo’s deranged cursing over the receiver, as the man pulled the blade out of her stomach. She shrieked as the flesh warm steel tore its way free, thick blood pooling through her shirt as she sank to her knees. The man disappeared from her sights a moment later, dissolving into the scores of terror-stricken people that hurried around her panickily. None of them noticing the woman bleeding out in the middle of the road. Rey couldn’t hold herself up anymore as she weakly pressed her hands to her side, blood seeping through her fingers, she sank down on to the concrete pavement, the blood-loss making her head feel lighter by the second. She didn’t hear his racing footsteps approaching her, the music still faintly playing in the background.

As her lifeblood poured from the gaping wound in her side; Rey felt breathless. A single point of stillness within the madness and swirling chaos around her. Vaguely she realized she had been lifted from the hard concrete, was being carried, the jostling movement burned her side and she couldn’t tell if it was her or the crowd screaming around them.

“Breathe,” the dark-haired man shouted at her, his sweat-drenched locks falling over his face. **_Breathe_** , the song echoed back to her, **_breathe in the air_**.

**_Don’t be afraid to care…_ **

“Stay with me, Rey,” he panted, running as fast as he could with her towards the car.

**_Leave… Don’t leave me._ **

“Where… would… I…go?” Rey managed through small harsh breaths, and a tear fell from Kylo’s eyes onto her cheek.

“Don’t talk, Rey. Breathe. Just Breathe.”

She didn’t notice when they reached the car, when he opened the door, and placed her softly onto the passenger seat.

She was only barely aware of the sound of the car as it hummed to a start.

 _Don’t cry_ , she wanted to say, _not for me_. But only managed to raise her hand slightly to caress his cheek, watching the blood paint his porcelain white skin red.

“I am… so…so sorry… Ben…” Rey managed to choke out.

“No,” he cried, “No, no, no…” his voice a broken fear-stricken whisper.

 _Not again_ , Kylo screamed inside his head, _not again_.

 

 ** _Balanced on the biggest wave…_** the song echoed through the headphones; the tears made the blood on his cheek run.

 

 

**_You race towards an early grave._ **

 

 


	7. Us and Them

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "You said, 'I love you'. Why is it that the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still the thing we long to hear? 'I love you' is always a quotation. You did not say it first and neither did I, and yet when you say it, and when I say it, we speak like savages who have found three words and worship them."  
> -Jeanette Winterson/ Written on the Body

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey! I deeply apologize over how long I took with this chapter. I did not intend for such a long hiatus, but work and studies got in the way and this project of mine kept getting delayed. As an apology for taking so long, I am going to upload two long-ass chapters in two days (the second one will hopefully be coming tomorrow so look out for that). Please give me your reviews in the comments, they would absolutely make my day!
> 
> Additional Information:  
> Ranks in the National People's Army: (from lowest to highest)  
> Warrant Officer.... Unterleutnant....Leutnant.....Oberleutnant.....Hauptmann.....Major.... Oberstleutnant..... Oberst....General Major....General Leutnant.....General Oberst....Army General.  
> Headquarters of NPA were in Strausberg, Berlin, which is a few hours out of the main city.

**_You race towards an early grave._ **

****

 

** Strausberg, East Berlin, 1982 **

Eleven o’clock morphed into twelve, and then one and two… The time trickled by, marked only by those changing, ever-growing numerals, yet his mind was blank, and sleep evaded him. Where there should have been dreams, there was only a heavy blankness. His eyes were as stationary as the silhouette of his bedside lamp, which was where they rested, unfocused, unmoving, all night. The sallow glow of the streetlamp behind the curtains slowly turned into white, and the blaring alarms from the far corner of his room brought him out of his uneasy haze. However, he did not move to turn them off though he could not have been more awake. The alarms rotated between six different annoying noises of varying pitch and volume, incessant, urgent, but after a few minutes of ignoring them, they stopped, defeated. But his heartbeat did not slow down. It was like his body was _trying_ to keep him awake, despite how badly he craved the release of uninterrupted, dreamless sleep; his eyes stung, he had just barely slept three hours this week (a record low, even for him), couldn’t bring himself to somehow just close his eyes for the faintest second. The steady ticks of the clock were like a guttural shriek in his mind, it grated his nerves and made him grit his teeth, made his mind dive to the bottom of his subconsciousness where lurked the most disturbing of his thoughts, threatening to take over his conscious self. Poe was a man doomed, to paddle through the depths of his own dark, disturbing mind, continually and forever, but never having the courage to sink.

His eyes glanced at the wall clock, the hands indicating the time: _6.45_ am _._

 _I’ll be late, if I stay here any longer_ , he thought, a miserable sigh escaping his lips, as he lifted his body off the bed, a daily chore for him, and began his monotonous routine of getting ready for work. It didn’t take long, because he barely put any effort in it anymore, lazily slipping on his shirt and trousers, and the stone-gray jacket he had grown to hate over the last fifteen years, the twisted silver cords and the three stars on his shoulder straps indicating his _Oberst_ rank.

He picked up his visored service cap, and the keys which lay on his bedside table, and walked out the front door of his modest apartment, without having eaten so much as a piece of bread. He knew he would regret it by noon, but he didn’t feel like he had the energy to chew down any food yet. A cup of coffee at work would have to do.

Much to his disappointment, the drive only took fifteen minutes to arrive at its location, bringing Poe back to the place of all his despair barely twelve hours after he had left it. In fact, it didn’t seem like he had ever left at all; even when he exited its narrow, poorly-lit halls, the feeling of imprisonment followed him all the way back to his apartment, preventing his eyes from falling asleep, keeping his mind locked in the suffocating walls of the cold gray building.

Today, however, felt different; there were too many people, all in their parade uniforms, and Poe felt like someone had forgotten to give him the memo. He walked to his office, confused and uneasy, and questioned the new secretary about the commotion.

“Some of the border troops from the Ministry of National Defense are being allocated to the National People’s Army’s Ground Troops, sir.”

“ _Some?_ ” Poe questioned, looking around at the scores of men and women who were walking around all over the place, puzzled as to where they were supposed to go.

“On whose orders?” Poe asked her.

“Army General Erich Mielke, sir.”

Poe sighed, “And did the Minister agree to this?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And why wasn’t a formal letter sent to my office informing me of this development?”

“It was, sir.”

“I see. And you didn’t feel it was necessary to inform me?”

The woman looked down at her table. “I’m sorry, sir, I forgot.”

Poe sighed, “Very well. Have they been given an orientation already?”

“They have, sir.”

“And do you have a list of the ones that have been assigned to our division?”

“I do, sir,” the woman said, handing him a brown paper file. Poe opened it, and skimmed through the names; _Connix, Kindler, Brecher, Kirschtein, Neumann, Schmitz_ , but recognized none.

“Please tell them to come see me, before heading to their office, Miss…”

“Springer, sir.”

“Miss Springer. And tell them I will address them shortly.”

“Yes, sir.”

Poe headed to his office, where he kept his parade uniform at all times precisely for an unforeseen event like this one. He closed the door behind him, changed his jacket, and pinned his medals to his chest, waiting for the recruits to walk in one by one.

Lieutenant Edward Schmitz showed up first, Major Hoffman after him and so on, one after the other, Meissner and Reimelt, Connix and Kroll, all saluting to him and stomping their feet loudly on the ground with their heavy boots. Poe exchanged a few curt words with them, and assigned them their own departments: motorized infantry, engineering, signals, military bands, and the rest. The whole thing went by much smoother than Poe expected, the recruits didn’t ask many questions and were equally as to-the-point as Poe himself tried to be.

He was shuffling through some files on his table, when another voice announced itself, followed by the familiar stomp on the ground.

“Major Finn Kirschtein, sir!”

Poe looked up from his desk, a look of recognition flashing across his eyes as he took in the man’s dark-brown eyes, his dark skin and charcoal-black hair. He knew those eyes, they were unmistakable. He knew he had seen the man before; in fact, how could he ever have forgotten.

Though, he hadn’t asked him his name, then…

_“What the fuck is wrong with you, soldier!?” the commanding officer had bellowed._

_“Sir, he’s down,” the boy tried to reason with him, “There’s no way he can get up. His spine is-”_

_“Did I tell you to argue or did I tell you to shoot the damn traitor!?”_

_“Sir, please-”_

_“Do you want to be court-martialed, Warrant Officer!?”_

_“No, sir, but-”_

_“Then shoot him, goddammit!”_

_The traitor in question was lying helpless on the ground, mere meters away from The Wall, his spine shattered by the unlucky bullet that had found him, his fingers shot straight off as he had tried to climb the looming structure with his bare hands. The men and women on the other side were screaming, “Murderers! Barbarians!” helpless to do anything but watch, as their fellow human being cried and wailed in pain before them._

_“Get up, Connie!” a woman shouted at him, “Please! Don’t give up!”_

_The boy looked through the sniper scope at the woman, who was the source of the cheer, perched atop The Wall on the other side, seeing her cheeks stained with tears, the barbed wire cutting the arm of her shoulder as she extended a helpless arm towards the poor man crying in agony beneath The Wall. He fired off a warning shot and the woman backed her arm away with a start._

_“He’s helpless, sir,” the boy turned back, “… and an East German citizen, no less… Sir, we cannot treat our people like this. If he has committed a crime, he should go to prison, not be shot here, like a dog-”_

_“Are you disobeying a direct order, cadet?!”_

_“No, but-”_

_“Shoot now, cadet!” his commanding officer screamed behind him, “Shoot him!”_

_The boy began to back away from the gun, his hands sweating, and as dark as it was, Poe could see the conflict in his eyes, the battle between obeying an order from his commanding officer, as immoral as it was, or risk the possibility of being court-martialed. His expression, though, betrayed his conscience, making it clear that if anyone was going to shoot the man, it was not going to be him._

_Poe didn’t even think before his next move._

_In an instant, he had shoved the cadet aside, his own fingers tightening around the trigger to take a sharp calculated shot that resounded in the air as it head the man’s head, splattering his blood all over The Wall to the horrified faces of the onlookers on the other side. The air was silent._

_“Murderers!” a violent, tortured scream cut through the silence. “Murderers!” the crowd joined in. “Nazis!” “Barbarians!” “Soviet scum!”_

_Poe ignored the outburst, turning around instead, to help the boy rise to his feet. He was young, probably only 18 or 19 years at most, but his eyes were old, and the most beautiful color of brown Poe had ever seen. He looked at him with a bewildered expression, confused as to what exactly had just gone down, in a matter of seconds. But Poe turned away from him, before his own expression could belie the sense of horror he felt at what he had just done._

_“I think my job here is done,” Poe sighed, turning to the officer, seemingly unfazed by the screams and cries that muffled his own voice. “You can expect that I’ll give a formal report of my inspection here to the Ministry of National Defense.”_

_“Yes, sir,” the commanding officer said._

_“Oh, and do see to it that the Warrant Officer is_ not _punished, Commander.”_

_The man looked at him in confusion, but Poe ignored him to turn to the boy._

_“You’ll do well to follow orders next time, Warrant Officer,” he sighed again, “Someone like me won’t always be there, you know…” he said, as he swiftly walked out the door, descending the stairs to exit the tower._

_“Why did you do it?”_ they both wanted to ask each other. _Why didn’t you shoot him when you knew the man was a traitor_ , Poe wanted to ask. _Why did you shoot him, when you knew it was wrong_ , Finn wanted to ask. But, they had never met again, the brief encounter leaving them plagued with unanswered questions, both unable to fathom the other’s reasons for what they did that night.

But even now, after nearly seven years, when they were finally face to face again… unanswered questions remained just that; unanswered. Because neither had the courage to bring up the subject.

Poe asked him a few routine questions, ones he had asked every other new recruit who had walked through his office in the past hour, the question he really wanted to ask, just on the tip of his tongue. Finn didn’t mention it either, answering his questions with a curt, “Yes, sir” or “No, sir” and nothing else.  After the questioning, Poe assigned him his office, and the man walked out with a salute, a calm, composed look on his face. He did not see how Poe almost opened his mouth to call him back inside again.

He did not talk to him the rest of the day either, keeping himself locked in his office for the rest of the day, poring over unimportant military files all day, until Springer came to bring him his afternoon coffee.

But, Poe drove home that day, feeling less tired than usual. And when he reached home, his head hit the pillows, and his eyes drifted off to the first full night’s sleep he had had in years, dreamless and quiet, like paddling through an ocean, forever.

* * *

 

It wasn’t until nearly a month later, that Poe got to speak to Finn again. They _had_ passed each other down the hall many a times, Finn always saluting with a loud, “Sir!” to Poe’s tired mutters of “At ease,” and Finn would often leave some important files for him in his office, but their conversation never expanded beyond the formal “Good morning, sir” and “Will that be all, Major?”. They hadn’t gotten a moment to properly talk yet, until Finn opened the door to his office that Monday, a bundle of files in his arms.

“ _Oberst_ Dameron, sir! May I come in?”

Poe let him in, with a slight wave of his arm. “Major Kirschtein,” Poe nodded towards him as Finn set the files on his desk, “It would be so much easier for both of us if you stopped saluting to me every fifteen minutes.”

“Uh… sorry,” Finn said, backing away from the table. “Sir,” he added, almost as an afterthought.

“I’m just tired of saying “At ease,” to every single person I pass down the hall,” Poe muttered, rubbing his eyes, “And I’m sure saluting every ten minutes to “ _Oberst Dameron, sir!_ ”” he said, imitating Finn, “isn’t all that fun either.”

Finn chuckled at that, and Poe smiled at the sound.

“Make sure to tell the other cadets too, Kirschtein,” the word “cadet” leaving his mouth before he had a chance to think about it.

He looked up at Finn, finding him staring back.

“Uh, sorry. Tell your other _colleagues_ , I meant to say.”

“I will, sir.” Finn replied, maintaining eye-contact.

“What are these files then, Major?”

Finn looked down, as if caught off-guard “Uh…” he paused, “The Ministry of National Defense sent over these files of the new recruits to be handed over to the _Oberst_ of the Division. Most of them are for the recruits in the engineering and motorized infantry department, to be signed and approved of by you. They also sent a letter,” Finn said, laying a piece of paper on top of the files, “stating that the rest of the files will arrive within the week.”

“Which department are you in, Major?”

“Communications, sir.”

“Ah, I see. So, any letters or urgent messages from the Ministry of National Defense and the Kremlin go through you?”

“Yes, sir,” Finn declared, a bit nervously this time, “Our department does not have an _Oberstleutnant_ for supervision, sir. Hence, I am the senior-most in my department and all communications go through me. I assure you, sir, I will not let you d-”

“Relax, relax, Major Kirschtein,” Poe said, sinking back into his rotating chair, “I was not expressing any doubts over your capabilities, just inquiring as to the state of my division. An _Oberst_ is allowed to do that, right?” Poe looked up, “As long as it doesn’t step on your jurisdiction, that is. _Major,_ ” Finn chuckled at his comment, the sound making Poe smile. “And I’m sure that if you continue to do your job as diligently as is required of you, you may even get promoted to _Oberstleutnant_ within the year.”

The man before him visibly reddened, “Thank you, sir,” he said, “For your confidence in me. I hope I deserve it.”

“Don’t mention it, Kirschtein,” Poe waved his hand, dismissively. “And _don’t_ disappoint me.”

“I won’t, sir,” the man smiled, raising his hand to salute, when Poe shot him an annoyed look. “Sorry,” he chuckled, “Force of habit, I suppose,” he stuttered, fumbling awkwardly with his hands. “Good evening, sir,” he finally said, opting to politely nod his head in his superior’s direction.

“Good evening, Major,” Poe replied, watching the other man exit the room, shutting the door quietly behind him.

* * *

 

** Winter, 1983 **

Days turned into weeks, weeks turned into months… and with every successive meeting, Poe felt himself getting closer and closer to Finn. He was an exceptionally good-natured person, Poe discovered, kind and sympathetic, and with ideas not only too revolutionary for East Germany, but also for the world at large, which he defended most passionately in front of Poe’s depressing cynicism, with an almost boyish idealism that Poe couldn’t help but envy, just a little bit. He also paid no mind to _who_ heard them, not even thinking it worth consideration that the _Oberst_ of one’s own division could be one to rat him out to the Soviets, an act of his that often made Poe fearful for the man, but the way he spoke and the way his eyes always twinkled when he spoke of ‘ _building a better future’_ , an idea that Poe would have scoffed at had it been anyone else, was so engrossing that Poe couldn’t help but listen to him for hours on end. His earnestness was infectious, his idealism was captivating and Poe had been thinking for quite a while that he would like nothing more than to reach out and kiss him. Until he finally did.

They were at the annual military dinner. The whole division was invited. It was late, probably two or three in the morning, and the ballroom was packed with military men and women from all divisions of the military, every single department. The music was too loud, some popular techno band was playing. They had both had a little too much to drink, and the laughter flowed smoothly between them as they conversed leisurely, an informality that had taken months to cultivate. Poe didn’t remember exactly, but at some point, his leg had brushed up against Finn’s, and Finn had looked back at him with those infectiously brown eyes, eyes that had been infecting his mostly-dreamless sleep for months now, pupils dilated with alcohol and desire, and a wide grin on his face with the joke he had stopped mid-sentence, seeing the look reflected in Poe’s eyes as well.

They had struggled to make it out of the party, pushing their way through the scores of intoxicated men, venturing through the other equally over-filled ballrooms, and through the kitchens in search of an exit, to find one quiet, abandoned hallway behind one of the less-frequented doors.

The lustful look in Finn’s eyes was unmistakable. Poe couldn’t resist reaching out and pressing his thumb lightly over Finn’s upper lip, as his other hand removed the visored cap he was still wearing.

Finn didn’t want to go slow though, as he locked his lips with Poe’s in a feverish passionate kiss, making him moan into his mouth, as he pushed Poe back against the wall of the dimly-lit hallway.

Poe didn’t remember much; the drive back to his apartment was hazy. He didn’t remember who pushed who against the wall, or how Finn’s leg got raised up on Poe’s shoulders, his nose slightly nuzzling against the man’s crotch as Finn arched his back against the wall.  But he did remember every moan that escaped his lips, every gasp as he angled his hips a certain way, every hitch in his breath as he hit a particularly sweet spot that made Finn’s eyes unfocused and his sighs jump an octave. The look on his face as the tightening strings of tension in his lower abdomen broke apart inside him with a loud groan, that Poe muffled with his own hand, burying his face in the pillows beside him.

Poe woke up the next morning, Finn’s lithe form draped across his chest as sunlight filtered in through the curtains, illuminating his soft brown eyes as he slowly blinked up at him and smiled, and despite the unbelievable exhaustion of the previous night, for once in what felt like years, Poe felt utterly and completely well-rested.

 

* * *

 

 

They got dressed slowly that morning, taking in the site of each other’s naked flesh, the tussled hair, the tired yet sated expressions, and Finn felt Poe’s eyes lingering on him as he turned around to pull on his pants, looking away when he turned back, almost like he didn’t want Finn to know how he admired him. Finn nearly felt offended by that, because how _dare_ he look away. Without warning, he pulled at the tie that hung around Poe’s neck, bringing their bodies uncomfortably close before locking their lips together, tongues moving slowly against one other, feeling Poe’s hands involuntarily move against the wide expanse of his chest, smoothing out the ridges of tension in his collarbone and shoulders, and Finn could feel a moan growing in his throat. He pulled back and was rewarded with that delirious expression on Poe’s face, eyes half-lidded and drunk.

The alarms on Poe’s clock made them both jump, and Finn walked towards it to shut it off, taking out the cells from behind; it had been the fifth alarm that had interrupted them this morning.

“Why do you have so many alarms?” Finn questioned, amused, “I didn’t take the _Oberst_ for a heavy sleeper.”

Poe sighed, fastening the tie around his neck, “I’m really not.”

“Then why all the alarms? They’re quite annoying, you know,” he said, “We wouldn’t be disturbed at my place,” he added with a wink.

Poe smiled at him dryly, sitting down on the corner of the bed, “I… I don’t… know how to explain it.”

“Try me.” Finn challenged, taking a seat beside him.

Poe fell silent for a moment, before replying, “Well…” he started, “I’m an insomniac,” he paused.

He glanced at Finn who was listening intently and continued, “Every day… I come home from work. I eat my dinner. I sort out the files I have to work on. And I always _plan_ to go to sleep, but every time I sit down and try, I just cannot bring myself to close my eyes.  Even when I do, sleep…evades me. When I close my eyes… the faces… of all the people I meet during the day, the things that they say to me, the places I go to, even the files I sign… all of it just gets… jumbled up, sort of. And it keeps swimming behind my eyes, and it makes me so dizzy, I feel nauseated. So…” he paused, “I don’t go to sleep. I don’t _like_ going to sleep. I just… stay awake… all night, just sitting on the bed, looking at the drawn curtains, until it’s no longer dark outside. But… I don’t want to be awake either. I don’t want to put on my uniform every day, warm up the coffee, start the car, go to work, sign the documents, and on and on. I… I… just exist… in this strange limbo, between consciousness and unconsciousness. Where nothing really feels… _real_.”

Finn nodded, “Why do you keep the alarms then?”

Poe inhaled sharply, “Because I have no choice. I _have_ to go to work every day. And if I don’t set those alarms, there’s nothing to force me out of that… haze.”

“What do you mean, you don’t have a choice?” Finn looked concerned now, and Poe hated how he had derailed a perfectly lively conversation with his bullshit. But, as if hearing his thoughts, Finn cupped his cheek with his palm, reassuring him, “It’s okay. I like listening to you.”

Poe smiled back weakly and continued, “I can’t leave this job. I can’t _not_ go to work. Not even for a single day.”

“But if you hate it so much, why do you do it?”

“It’s… complicated.”

Finn nodded, understanding that Poe must have his reasons, and that he could not possibly tell him everything _now_. He’d just have to wait. “How long have you had insomnia?” he asked.

“Eight, maybe nine years,” he said.

Finn’s eyes widened in horror, “Really? Have you consulted a doctor?”

“I have. They prescribed some sleeping medication, but none of it works. I just… don’t… _want_ to close my eyes.”

Poe finished talking, leaving Finn with more questions than answers, and most of all an overwhelming sense of worry for this man and the kind of dark, unsettling thoughts that might lurk in his mind to make him afraid to close his own eyes.

“Poe, can you do something for me?”

 The man looked up, “What?”

“Hold my hand. And close your eyes.”

Poe stared at him for a moment, before hesitantly complying, his fingers gently finding Finn’s warm hand, lacing their fingers together, and closed his eyes.

Finn leaned forward, running the thumb of his other hand softly over his eyelids, before bending down and kissing them.

When Poe opened his eyes again, he found Finn’s face an inch away from his, a smile on his face so radiant he could almost feel the warmth of it in his soul.

“Come on,” he said, “Let’s go get some breakfast.”

* * *

 

It had become a ritual for them. They would get dressed in the morning, go to work with nothing but an air of professionalism and business about them, but come evening, they’d tumble back to the apartment, Finn’s or Poe’s, clinging to each other with an almost desperate, craving need, after having kept their hands off each other (with varying degrees of success) all day, falling back against the silken sheets, and crying their throats raw. Poe loved seeing Finn at work. Every time he would come to his office, another bundle of files in his arms, his behavior was nothing if not professional, not a single hair out of place. He would reply to his questions with a curt, impersonal “Yes, sir,” and Poe loved it, because it always brought his mind back to the desperate _Yes’_ s he’d claw out of his throat at night. The stark contrast was so incredibly _lewd_ , Poe could hardly stop himself from bending the man over on the desk, right then and there. Finn would roll his eyes, try to hide the playful smirk tugging at his lips, uttering not a single word, maintaining the act _almost_ perfectly, knowing the obscene sounds playing over and over in Poe’s head as he rocked back and forth in his rotating chair.

It had become a ritual for them, _hiding_. Muffling their groans even at home, looking around corners to make sure no one was spying on them, an unshakeable, but completely rational, fear that they could not dislodge from the back of their minds, even as they laid each other bare, body and soul alike.

“Finn?” Poe tentatively asked, tracing soft circles down his back.

The man beside him hummed, “What is it?”

Poe sat up straighter in bed and looked back at his lover, his head buried in the pillows, hair disheveled, and a sleepy peaceful expression on his face as he tried to crack open an eyelid against the stream of sunlight coming from the window.

“Can I ask you a question?”

Finn turned his face away from the sunlight and pulled up the sheets to cover his face. “That’s already a question,” he groaned.

“Finn.”

“Yeah, sure. What is it?” he answered, voice still groggy from sleep.

“Can you tell me about your family, Finn?”

The man’s breathing shifted and Poe could _feel_ the tension he had created with that simple question. He knew Finn was hesitant to answer it, because he had tried asking it before, but Finn had always managed to avoid the question altogether, using Poe’s body against him, with a firmly placed touch here, or a soft kiss there. Now, though, the question was out in the open.

Finn sighed against the pillow, sleep slowly fading, realizing that there was no way he could avoid the personal questions any longer. _Slick bastard_ , Finn thought, _getting me to talk like this, right after what we just did_.

“What do you want to know?” he said, rolling over to face Poe.

“Where you were born, for starters.”

“Berlin. August, 1956.”

“East or West?”

Poe’s gaze was intent on getting to the bottom of him. Finn couldn’t resist it.

“West,” he answered.

“Really?”

“Yeah," he replied, "Well, a Western hospital anyway. But I have Eastern citizenship. Obviously."

“Tell me more.”

Looking up at the man from the bed was getting quite tiring, and Finn didn’t want to meet his eyes like this for too long lest he spill all his deepest secrets in the space of minutes. Finn sat up straighter in bed, with a sigh.  

“My father was German. And my mother was South African.”

“How did they meet?”

“You’re really not gonna let this go, are you?” Finn asked, and Poe smiled mischievously at him.

“Ugh. Fine,” Finn exclaimed. “My father’s name was Erik,” he started, “When I say he was German, I mean he had a German citizenship, but he barely spent any of his time in Germany after he turned eighteen. His family was significantly wealthy, so they could support whatever travels the eldest son embarked on, as long as he agreed to settle down with a nice German girl they had found for him by the time he was twenty-five. This was around…” Finn thought for a moment, “1937, 1938 maybe. His travels took him all over the world. All across Europe, the Americas, Africa… In 1939, the war began, so he couldn’t come home for a while. He found himself in South Africa, working as a… science teacher, I think. In a private school. That was where he met my mother, Lesidi. They fell in love, my father’s family threatened to cut him out of the inheritance if he married her. Naturally, my father, the absolute mad-man,” he laughed, “told them they could go fuck themselves.”

Poe laughed at the suddenness of the curse, “Of course, he did.”

“Yeah, of course,” Finn smiled. The conversation was flowing easily between them now, and Finn didn’t feel as hesitant to open up without Poe’s searing gaze on him.

“So,” he continued, “they got married. 1942. The war blew over. Come 1945, my Nazi-ass grandparents had lost all their fortune to the Soviets. And my father was here, in South Africa, with my mother, both working as school teachers. However, in 1948, the South Africans started the fucking Apartheid, and my mother couldn’t live there anymore. So, my father brought the two of them to Germany.”

“Berlin?”

“Yeah. That was where my grandparents had lived. But by that time, the old fuckers had passed away, God bless their souls,” Finn laughed, “and what little fortune they had left for my father was absolutely useless. They got a teaching job here too, both of them. Making ends meet, struggling to get by.  In 1956, they had me, and they finally moved out of their apartment and bought a house. My mother was working on getting her citizenship at the time. But, my mother got a citizenship from the Federal Republic of Germany while my father and I both had a German Democratic Republic citizenship. It didn’t matter in the beginning, because we all lived in Berlin, and whoever lived in Berlin, wasn’t an East German or West German citizen. They were just German citizens. But when they started constructing a wall slap bang in the middle of the city…

Poe could feel the pain in Finn’s voice now, “They deported Mom to the West. And Dad and I were here, in the East,” he continued, “Mom tried hard to get a visa so she could come see us but the GDR never gave her one.”

“How long has it been since you last saw her?”

“I saw her last… in 1966,” Finn’s voice cracked, “When I was 10.”

“About seventeen years ago, is that it?”

“Yeah.”

“Is she still alive?”

“Yeah, she is.”

“On the other side?”

“Yeah.”

“And your father?”

“He died three years back, actually.”

Finn’s body seemed smaller to Poe, then, like he had sunken back into his shell from the weight of the tale he had just narrated. Poe’s arms enveloped themselves around Finn, and the man looked up at him in surprise.

“I’m sorry,” Poe mumbled against his skin.

“It’s fine,” Finn said, “I’m fine,” though Poe could feel the tears trickling down his cheeks as he pressed his face to his, could hear the brokenness of his voice.

“Poe…” Finn breathed, as he felt Poe loosen his grip on the man’s back.

“What is it?”

“Don’t leave me,” he whispered, “I don’t think I’ll be able to handle it.”

Poe’s grip tightened, and he felt Finn’s arms go around his back, clinging to him.

“I won’t,” Poe replied.

 

* * *

 

 

“What kind of music do you listen to?” Poe asked him later, out of the blue, and Finn blinked at him, confused, pulling a t-shirt over his chest and walking over towards the bed in slow strides to sit beside him.

“Why do you ask?” he replied.

“No reason. Just curious.”

“Well…” he paused, “I don’t really listen to a lot of music, if I’m to be honest. Buying records is almost impossible around here, you know, so just… stuff on the radio, mostly. There are some good channels that I like, ones that don’t play just the hits. They usually play a lot of rock music and music from little known English bands. I don’t even know _how_ they got those albums. Because every time _I_ try looking for them, I’m utterly disappointed,” he paused. “Now that I come to think of it…we _should_ probably report them for possession of illegal contraband or something,” he laughed and Poe joined him, “But whatever. I like them. I hope they don’t get caught.”

“What songs do they play?”

“Um… I don’t think you’d know them,” he said, “In case you haven’t noticed… you’re old.”

“Hey!” Poe nudged him in the stomach, and Finn rolled back on the bed laughing, “I’m not that old! Stop telling people I’m old! Springer was asking me my age the other day, I bet it was that Sasha character from your department who put her up to it. And I wonder where _she_ heard it from.” Poe glared at him, sending Finn back into a fit of laughter.

“Your age is quite a running joke in the division, you know.”

“I am aware.”

“You _look_ , like a fucking first-year college student, not a single white strand in your hair,” Finn got up, running his hands softly through Poe’s brown curls, “and yet,” he leaned back against the mattress, “you’ve been in the division for fifteen years. Some say you’re thirty-five, some say you’re fifty-five,” Poe chuckled, “Some legends even say you fought in World War One.” Poe guffawed at that, and Finn smiled at the sound, “Only I know your _real_ age.” he finished, a teasing look in his eyes, before it disappeared into an unrestrained joyous grin.

“But do you, though?” Poe challenged and Finn could hear the smirk in his voice. “You don’t do a great job of keeping it a secret, then. _They’re on to me_.”

They fell back onto the bed, laughing, forgetting what they were even discussing before Poe brought it up again, “Come on, tell me.”

“Tell you what?”

“What songs do they play?”

“Oh, right, that. Well, um… recently they’ve been playing a lot of old Bowie songs, from 1977 or so. I only have two Bowie albums at home so it’s nice to listen to more of his music. Other than that… a bunch of other English bands whose names I wrote down, but seem to have forgotten, sadly. Yesterday, they played “All My Love” from this 1979 album of Led Zeppelin’s,” Finn looked at Poe to make sure he wasn’t losing him, instead seeing his eyes listening to him with interest, “Have you… heard of these bands before?”

“Of course, I have!” Poe looked at him, his expression almost offended, “I’m an old man, remember?”

Finn laughed, “Right, right. It’s just that most people around here haven’t heard of them so...” he trailed off.

“I know…” Poe replied, “It’s sad, really. They’re missing out on so much.”

“Exactly. You know, last year, the channel played a song by this old English band, and I absolutely fell in _love_ with it so much on the first listen, I just _had_ to buy the entire album. But I’ve been looking for almost a whole year, I’ve scoured nearly all the record stores in Berlin, but haven’t found it _anywhere_.”

“What was the song called?”

““Us and Them” by Pink Floyd.”

“I have that album.”

Finn sat up, “ _What?_ ”

Poe smiled, “I said, I have that album.”

“What do you mean, _‘I have that album_ ’?”

Poe smiled, kissing the tip of Finn’s nose, before getting up, off the bed, and walking outside the room, “Wait here,” he said.

He came back, ten, fifteen minutes later, a black square in one hand, and a record player in the other. Finn got up, helped him place the record player on the dressing table, plugging in the wires to the electricity port.

“I haven’t heard this album in _years_ ,” Poe said, “Back when this album came out, I had just been appointed _Leutnant_ of my squad, and one of my friends acquired this album from God-knows-where, and we used to listen to it at night at his apartment.”

“Friend, you say?” Finn arched an eyebrow at him.

Poe laughed. “We used to fuck,” Poe said, “But only occasionally.”

“What happened to him, this friend of yours?” Finn said.

At that, Poe’s face lost its smile. “He died,” he whispered.

“How?” Finn asked.

“I don’t really know,” Poe said, “One day, I came to the office, and they told me he had passed away from a heart attack. It didn’t really make sense, I knew that; the man was in perfectly fit condition the entire time I knew him. Didn’t even drink, the poor bastard. Anyway… I didn’t ask many questions. He probably just stumbled onto something he shouldn’t have,” Poe paused, handing the record over to Finn, “He was a bit of a loner, the poor guy, didn’t have many friends besides me.  They were going to throw away all his stuff, so I took all of his albums. Don’t think the poor dead fella would have liked to have his albums go to waste.”

“I doubt he would have…” Finn agreed, turning the cover over and inspecting it, a prism against an eerily dark background. ““Us and Them” is track number seven,” he said, “How _do_ you play a record?”

Poe grinned. “Time for my old-people skills,” he said, and took the album from his hands, discarding the cover and taking out the shiny black record from the inside. Finn watched him work, as he lifted the lid off the record player, placing the disc gently over the turn table, adjusting the knobs at its side, and the lever to place the cartridge gently on the record.

It had been so long since Finn had last heard this song. It had been much longer for Poe since he had last heard _any_ song. But the effect of it on the two of them was almost instantaneous, the jazzy, peaceful rhythm of it washing over them both, as Poe extended a hand towards Finn. Finn took it immediately, lacing their fingers together, melting into his embrace as they slowly swayed from side to side in the middle of the bedroom, the saxophone solo playing quietly in their ears.

“Finn…” Poe mumbled against the man’s cheek, “Can I ask you something?”

“Anything,” he replied.

“Do you remember the night we first met?” he said.

Finn stopped swaying. “Yes,” he breathed.

“Why didn’t you shoot that man that night? When you knew he was a traitor, a defector?”

Finn inhaled sharply. “Poe,” he began, “I…I don’t even know,” he spoke softly, “… why I didn’t do it.”

Poe pulled his head back, his hand snaking around Finn’s neck to make him look him in the eye. To Finn, Poe looked disappointed, almost.

“I’m sorry to disappoint you if you’ve been waiting for an answer to that for a long time,” Finn said.

 _You have no idea_ , Poe almost growled.

“All I can say is…” Finn continued, looking at Poe’s shoulder instead of his face, “When I saw that man, lying hopeless, defenseless, beneath The Wall. Bruised and injured, yet… his hands were still _trying_ to claw at the stone of the Wall, still _trying_ to vainly reach for the woman’s hand, I-” he paused, tears welling up in his eyes, “Never before in my life, had I been filled with such a sense of wrongness at what I was about to do. I- I couldn’t. I just… couldn’t. I don’t _know_ why.”

Finn looked up, met Poe’s eyes nervously…finding them equally wet with unshed tears.

 _My God_ , Poe thought, _My God_. _He has no idea how pure he is for this world. He doesn’t have a reason why he didn’t shoot him, because that’s the kind of person he is. The kind of person who sees someone who needs help and doesn’t think_ “Us and Them”. _Thinks only of how they’re hurting and how he wants to stop it. He’s too good, too good,_ Poe thought. _He cares too much, too deeply, too passionately._

_I hope I can die before I ruin him._

He ran his thumb across Finn’s cheek, and brought his lips to his own, the kiss deep and passionate, and Poe hoped Finn could feel the love he poured into it because _God_ , did he love him.

“I don’t think God has anything to do with it,” Finn mumbled against his skin and Poe realized he had just uttered the word out loud.

“Why not?”

“He wouldn’t approve of us.”

Poe scoffed, “I don’t think he cares who I fuck in my free time.”

Finn laughed at the man’s crassness, a pure blissful sound, and Poe couldn’t help but join him.

“I don’t want to believe in a God that would deny me who I _love_ ,” Poe whispered. “And he doesn’t.”

Finn looked back at him, wide-eyed and blushing, and pulled him back down into his embrace. _Love_ , he had said, involuntarily. A small word for the ocean of feelings inside him. But true, so undeniably true. 

“Why did you do it?” came Finn’s small voice after a while, “Shoot him?”

Maybe Poe hadn’t been able to find a clear answer for that question before but right then, right there, he couldn’t have been _more_ sure, when he replied.

“I wanted you to be alright,” he said.

The song was still playing, and they kept swaying from side to side like that, long after it had ended, the words hanging between them, tethering them to each other like every successive song that followed seamlessly after it.


	8. Brain Damage

**Strausberg, Spring 1984 **

“ _A spy_? There’s _a spy_?”

“Who told you?”

“There have been rumors going around for-”

“Shut up, Bettina, you can’t just go around spreading rumors like that-”

“I didn’t spread the rumor, the folks at the top have been discussing it for months-”

“How do _you_ know?”

“C’mon, Michael, tell her. You work with them, don’t you?”

“It’s true. They _have_ discovered a spy in the division.”

“Well, fuck me,” Thomas exclaimed, “Which department?”

“They don’t know yet-”

“Oh, c’mon, tell us where the leaks are coming from-”

“Yeah, man, tell us!”

The man hesitated, “They think it might be… Kirschtein.”

“Kirschtein?” Bettina shot him a quizzical look, “From Communications?”

“Ah, that makes sense. He was always did seem fishy to me,” Meleva sighed.

“Need I remind you, Meleva, he’s _your_ commanding officer.”

“He’s a goddamned spy, Thomas. That’s what he is.”

“He’s _not_ a spy.”

“Why not?” the woman snapped, “Karo, back me up here. You’ve seen how he acts, right?”

“Yeah, man,” Bettina started, “Karo has been in love with him for _ages_ -”

“Hey! What the hell, I told you that in confidence!”

“Who the hell cares?”

“I’m telling you, Thomas,” Meleva said, “she’s been giving him the lovestruck eyes for months, and the man hasn’t even _looked_ at her! There’s definitely something going on. Why would he ignore a beautiful woman like Karo? I bet he has some other secret mission that is occupying his attention.”

“Yeah,” Max joined in, “I think I agree with Meleva. He doesn’t even interact with us all that much. And we’re _from_ his Department. He’s supposed to be our _Oberstleutnant_ , and I doubt he even knows our names,” the man hissed, “The other day, I went to hand him over some files and he was talking very suspiciously on the landline. Then, just last month, I told him Karleen and I were pregnant, and he said he didn’t even know I was married! Jeez, can you believe that guy?”

“Are you fucking kidding me? You think that because Kirschtein doesn’t have the hots for Miss-I-Need-A-Good-Lay Karoline Spinster here, and didn’t know you were married, something I only found out last month too, I might add, you think he’s a _spy_? Is your standard for branding someone a traitor to the State so low?” Raquel sighed, flicking her hand in the air in agitation, “You guys are unbelievable, throwing your commanding officer under the bus like that. Have some goddamn shame, you bunch of whiny cunts. You’re all just sore that you didn’t get promoted to _Oberstleutnant_ like him.”

“Raquel… you defending him, like this – I can’t help but wonder if you’re not involved with him also. Sure seems suspicious to me….”

“That’s it. You’re really testing my fucking patience here, alright-”

“Guys, guys, guys!”

The group of bickering adults looked at the man who had suddenly interrupted them.

“We have no idea why the higher-ups think he might be a leak in the Division, okay? I’m sure they’re looking into everyone who’s even a little bit suspicious. Arguing and bickering like this doesn’t help our case at all, alright? We all just need to calm down, and trust whatever the authorities are doing. And despite his mannerisms, Kirschtein is still the head of his department so until proven guilty, we have to trust him.”

“But do you listen to the stuff he says sometimes? All that stuff about a United Germany? As if we’d ever go back to those fucking Capitalist _pigs_ … I don’t know, man… I’m not too sure about him sometimes…”

“Regardless of what you think… we have to wait. The truth will come out sooner or later.”

 

* * *

 

 

 

The words had followed him around all month.

 _Spy, spy, spy, who’s the spy_ \- over and over again, until that was all that echoed in his head.

But it wasn’t the rumors going around about him that troubled Finn, nor the suspicious way people had begun to look at him. No, Finn didn’t mind that at all; after all, being the only black man in the military sure did come with its fair share of staring and whispering behind his back.

Poe had begun to avoid him. _That_ was what troubled Finn.

 _Does he not trust me anymore_ , Finn wondered, another pile of files in his arms, as he made his way to his superior’s office. Poe had not spoken more than two words to him all week, and neither of them had visited the other’s apartment in more than a fortnight _. Is this all it took for him to forget me_ , Finn wondered, his mind falling down the familiar spiral of self-hatred and anguish, _a few rumors?_

 _Or maybe, he doesn’t want to associate with someone under the suspicion of being a spy? Doesn’t want to stain his pristine reputation…_ Finn wouldn’t blame him, if that was the case. He knew Poe already got enough disapproving glances from people over how much time he spent with his black subordinate. And the higher-ups _certainly_ didn’t approve of Finn’s influential position as the head of the Communications department, in one of arguably the military’s best divisions. God knows what the authorities would do if they ever found out how much time the two _really_ spent together. Maybe they’d send them both to Siberian labor camps to work the disease out of them, or keep them there until they died. Maybe they’d execute them, quietly in the dead of night, in the safe space of their own homes, make them disappear like that one friend Poe had told him about and appoint their replacements the very next day. Would anyone miss them, Finn and Poe? Well, _definitely_ not Finn, that was for sure. Maybe Poe would miss him, if he managed to escape. But over the last month, Finn couldn’t shake the feeling that he, too, would be glad to be free from this relationship.

In the end, they’d all be glad to see _the spy_ go.

The distance was suffocating, and his bed felt cold at night without Poe’s warmth next to him. But that wasn’t even the worst part. The worst part was the crushing realization that he couldn’t fathom how Poe could leave him like this, without a word.

He was _right there_ ; right there, down the hallway from him. Finn could go to him, reach out and touch him, feel his presence. But he _wasn’t_ there too; he didn’t want to be there and he didn’t want _him_ to be there either. With how cold Poe had been lately, Finn felt as if Poe didn’t want him, or worse, _them_ to exist at all. Every brief instance Finn met Poe’s eyes, and held his gaze for the slightest moment, he could see nothing but guilt and pain in Poe’s eyes. _I wish I had never met you_ , Finn translated his glances in his head, _I wish you could disappear and I would never have to look at you again._

Finn pushed open his _Oberst’s_ door with the heel of his boot, balancing the files inelegantly in his arms. Poe was talking to someone on the landline, his back turned to him in his rotating chair. He was always doing that these days, and at this point, Finn was almost completely certain that it was just a clever tactic to avoid any conversation with him.  Poe didn’t turn around, waving a hand dismissively at him, gesturing for him to enter. Finn walked brusquely to the table and set the files on it with as loud a thud as possible.

The noise startled Poe, who turned around to face his subordinate. Finn cleared his throat and pushed a tiny piece of paper towards him.

“I’ll call you back, alright?” Poe mumbled into the phone, his eyes narrowing trying to decipher the look on Finn’s face. He set the hand-set back onto the telephone with a _tring_ , and picked up the folded piece of paper Finn had pushed towards him.

 _Can we talk? Please?_ it said.

Poe’s eyes darted to Finn’s for just a second, and if Finn caught the guilt-ridden expression on the other’s face, he did not react. Poe reached out for a pencil and hurriedly scribbled something back to him.

“Please review the document in your office, _Oberstleutnant_ Kirschtein,” Poe muttered, and Finn got the hint. “I’ll be expecting a report by noon, is that understood?”

“Yes,” Finn replied, and he wondered if his voice sounded too breathless to make Poe flinch like that.

“That will be all.”

Finn hurried back to his office, the stares followed him but he paid them no mind. Once he was safely in the confines of his own room, he shut the door behind him, and slumped against it as he unfolded the paper.

 _Not tonight_ , it said, and Finn’s heart sank at the words before he read the next line.

_Meet me the day after tomorrow, 2 am sharp._

Finn didn’t realize he was holding his breath until he read the words and let out an audible exhale. Below the words was an address, scribbled almost illegibly but Finn understood his handwriting all the same. It was far away from their apartments; wasn’t even in Strausberg, for that matter. But Finn knew the place. It was close to this loud, overcrowded bar Finn had taken him to one weekend, in the first few months of their relationship. Neither of them had had a good time, and so instead of drinking all night, they had decided to explore the area instead. There were rows of small cozy-looking hotels a short walk away from the bar, and that night, neither of them had gone back to their apartment.

Finn smiled at the memory, and then at the paper in his hands. _He hasn’t forgotten me_ , he thought, relief flooding his chest, _not yet anyway_. He stood up and straightened his stone-gray uniform jacket, walking over to the window of his office, and pulled out a lighter and a single cigarette from his pocket. He placed the paper in front of the lighter and pushed the button; the paper caught fire instantaneously. He used the fire from the paper to light the cigarette and threw the paper down the window as it burned. Poe hated when he smoked, and he only really did when he was very stressed out. “ _Don’t do that,”_ Poe would scold him, trying to snatch the cigarette from between his fingers, “ _Those will kill you, you know._ ” He even threatened to kick him out of bed if he smoked, but his threats were empty, neither of them wanted to be away from each other’s warmth, and Finn had only laughed, before putting the cigarette out in an ashtray beside him.

Finn hoped the smell of burning tobacco would linger on his jacket, so that when he walked into Poe’s office at noon, he’d be able to smell it on him.

At noon, Finn walked out of his office, calm and composed, a brown file in his hand, empty except for a single torn piece of paper. He entered Poe’s office, and the man looked at him with a look of such desperation, Finn could hardly believe he was doubting the man’s devotion mere hours ago. He put down the file and took his leave, walking out as quietly as he had entered.

After he left, Poe opened the file, feeling just the slightest tinge of fear at what Finn’s answer would be, and read the single word on the paper before him.

_Okay._

* * *

 

 

The day passed, and so did the one after it, until finally, Finn found himself sitting in his car at 11.46 pm, driving on the highway out of Strausberg. He hadn’t even changed his uniform when he had reached his apartment, had sat there idly waiting for the minutes to pass, until he could finally leave. He _was_ leaving early, and he’d probably get there much sooner than 2 am, but he didn’t care. The walls in his apartment were stifling, and he had decided he would much rather take the blinding headlights of the cars on the highway as they approached him, the quiet rumbling of his car, the loud horns from the trucks that passed him, and the approaching lights of Berlin up ahead, to the cold _empty_ gray of his own room.

It took him an hour to reach the city and another half hour to find the bar in the crowded Berlin streets. He parked his car in a parking lot near it, and decided to find the hotel on foot. He glanced at his watch and the hands specified the time, _1.20 am_. He still had some time before Poe would show up, but he didn’t want to reach the hotel before him and wait to see if he would. He knew that his anxiety would probably eat him alive before that, wondering whether he had changed his mind and he didn’t want to see Finn after all. So, Finn took his time, quietly strolling down the streets, across the roads, on the borders of local parks, until he couldn’t waste any more time, and found himself at the entrance of the hotel Poe had specified, the same one they had spent a night at months ago. It was now _1.43 am_. Finn sighed, begrudgingly opening the door to the hotel, and walked into the lobby.

Poe was sitting on a chair in the far corner of the lobby, cross-legged, slouched over himself, and his head resting in his palms. He raised his head when he saw Finn enter; he didn’t look like he had slept in the last two days, they were deep dark circles beneath his eyes, his hair was disheveled, and Finn saw that his body was trembling. Finn hadn’t seen his _Oberst_ out of uniform in over two weeks, and at the office, when he had seen him a few hours ago, he had seemed so composed and _sane_. But sitting there, in nothing but a thin t-shirt and torn jacket thrown over his shoulder, body shivering, Finn couldn’t handle the sight. Poe stood up as Finn approached him, and Finn removed his uniform jacket and wrapped it around the man’s shoulders. Poe clung to him almost desperately, his hands bunching up the fabric of Finn’s dress shirt.

“Come on, let’s go upstairs,” Poe sighed against him, his breath condensing in the air.

Finn didn’t question the man, he had probably booked a room beforehand, and followed his _Oberst_ as he weakly led him up the stairs and into their room.

Before Poe could even switch on the lights, Finn attacked his lips with his own, backing him gently into the room with one arm and shutting the door with the other. Poe didn’t react at first, astonished by the suddenness of it, but soon Finn’s warm tongue prodded at his bottom lip, prying open his mouth and Poe’s body melted against him. The kiss was feverish, both of them opening their mouths hungrily against each other, their tongues melding together like they had finally found home.

“Finn…” Poe sighed, “Please listen to me…”

“I don’t want to listen,” Finn replied, in between caresses, “Don’t talk. Don’t think. Just _feel_.”

“Finn, please-”

“ _No._ ”

Finn’s hand reached down lower, pressing gently at the sensitive skin of Poe’s lower back, and the words died in his throat as he arched his neck to the side, giving Finn access to the softer skin. He pressed his lips to Poe’s Adam’s apple, eliciting a breathy sigh to escape his throat. Poe’s arms were still limp at his side, ignoring how badly Finn wanted him to run his fingers through his hair. Finn pressed his fingers at his back even more firmly, and caught his bottom lip between his teeth, as if exacting his revenge.

“Finn, please listen to me-”

“Shut up.”

“Please-”

“ _No._ ”

“Finn,” Poe paused.

“I’m a spy.”

It was like a record suddenly stopped spinning, the song pausing mid-impact. Finn’s hands stopped moving, his lips stilled at the bottom of his throat.

“Did you hear what I said?” Poe asked, softly, “Finn-”

Finn moved his fingers from his back, and Poe sighed at the loss of contact. He moved backwards, his back colliding with the wall behind him. Poe couldn’t look him in the eye.

“Look at me,” Finn muttered, harshly.

Poe raised his eyes to meet Finn’s blinking at him in confusion.

“What did you say?” Finn breathed.

“I’m a spy,” he replied, clutching Finn’s jacket tighter around his shoulders.

“Don’t joke about this with me, Poe.”

“I’m not,” Poe replied, “I _am_ a spy.”

Finn’s eyes searched Poe’s, looking for a trace of humor in his eyes or a hint of a lie in his expression, but found none. Poe’s heart almost collapsed at the look of absolute hurt that flashed across his lover’s eyes.

“Finn-”

Finn was already moving, adjusting his shirt and wiping his mouth at his sleeve to remove the taste of Poe’s lips from them. “Finn, please just sit down, and we can talk about it-” Poe tried to grab Finn’s arm, and the man flinched away from his contact.

“I… I need some space,” Finn breathed out, opening the door to the room. A shiver ran down Poe’s spine. He didn’t know if it was the cold draught from the open door or the emotionlessness of Finn’s voice.

Poe removed his jacket from his shoulders, holding it out to him. “Take this,” he said, “It’s cold.”

Finn looked back at him for a second. “Keep it,” he muttered, walking outside, and closing the door behind him.

 

* * *

 

The wait was _excruciating_.

The seconds ticked by, lazing away slower than usual, making two minutes feel like a week, when only just moments ago, in Finn’s embrace, they had passed away in the blink of an eye. Poe didn’t sit down. He just stood there motionless where Finn had left him, waiting for him to come back. _Where is he right now?_ Poe wondered. _Maybe he’s standing right outside the door, slumped against the filthy hallways walls, taking a moment to think about what he should do next._ If Poe had had the courage, he would have twisted the door knob to see if he was still standing, but his feet wouldn’t move. Anyway, it had been far longer than a _moment_ now. A much more plausible scenario, was that Finn was outside, in the little phone box near the hotel, that Poe was sure Finn had noticed when he had got here. Finn had said it looked cozy, back when they had first seen it together, what now felt like an eternity ago. Finn would probably be at the phone box right now, calling the Major General about him, informing him that he was a _spy_. For some reason, Poe couldn’t bring himself to care that Finn might be informing the authorities right about now, telling them the secret he had kept hidden so perfectly for over the last fifteen years. He could walk through the door any moment, handcuffs in hand, and take him to the headquarters, even hand him to the Stasi. He still wouldn’t care.

 _When_ he would come back, was all he cared about. _If_ he would come back at all. Poe wouldn’t blame him if he never wanted to see his face again, wouldn’t blame him if he came back only to shoot him in the face. He could never blame him, never him. He’d be glad to die at his hands, if only to look into his brown eyes one last time _._ Would they be as kind as they usually were, Poe wondered, or would they be angry and violent, a look he could not imagine his eyes to ever be capable of.

Time stretched on, and he did not come back.

3 am.

4 am.

5 am.

At the crack of dawn, as sunlight began to pour into the room, Poe heard a knock at the door. His feet moved, aching from standing all night, before he could even think about it. His hand twisted the door knob and pulled open the door.

Finn had been crying, that much he could see. His eyes were red, and his hair felt thinner somehow, like he had been pulling at it all night. Poe didn’t have the strength to meet his eyes, could not tolerate the pain in them. Pain _he_ had caused.

Finn didn’t acknowledge him, entering the room silently, and crossing over to the chairs near the window. He gestured for Poe to take a seat opposite him, which he did, and sat down.

“I… I have a few questions,” Finn spoke after a while, finally raising his head to meet his eyes.

Poe nodded, “Go ahead.”

“For whom?” he started, “For whom are you a spy?”

 “The Central Intelligence Agency.”

Finn winced, but continued.

“Since when?”

“Ever since I came to East Berlin.”

“You mean you weren’t born here?”

“No.”

“Where were you born?”

“Denver, Colorado.”

“When did you come to East Berlin?”

“May 14th, 1969.”

“How old were you?”

“Twenty-two.”

“How did you join the CIA?”

Poe took a deep breath. “They approached me at college. I was studying at Colorado College at the time. I was the best student in mathematics and political science in my class. One day, I was presenting a paper on East-West relations at a conference when some of their operatives approached me and told me I would be a good asset to the country. I was young, foolishly patriotic. And far too impressionable. The job sounded cool. No more college loans. Traveling around the world. Everything handed to you on a silver platter. All for the exchange of some information. It seemed… easy. So, I left college early, and got myself recruited. Two years later, they shipped me off here, alone, and I became a Warrant Officer in the ground troops.”

Finn nodded slowly, taking in the information.

“How many people have you killed?” he asked after a while.

“Too many to count.”

“Why did you kill them?”

“Different reasons,” Poe swallowed, “Sometimes, I was ordered to by the CIA. Sometimes, I was ordered to by the KGB. Sometimes, they got too close to finding out who I really was, and I wasn’t left with any choice.”

Finn flinched at his words. “Are you going to kill me after this too?” he asked. His voice didn’t sound scared. It sounded numb and for Poe, that was decidedly much worse.

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because I love you.”

Finn looked at him in disbelief. “Why does that change anything?” he asked. “Why does you being in love with me give me a free pass?”

“I don’t know.”

The answer wasn’t good enough. “Is that all it takes to get under Poe Dameron’s skin? A good fuck?  Would you have spared the others too if you had fucked them first?” Finn’s words cut; he was trying to hurt him, to get a reaction out of him, but his heart wasn’t in it. His tone wasn’t as cruel as it should have been.

“I don’t know,” Poe muttered again.

Finn inhaled sharply. “That’s not good enough.”

“I don’t have the answer for what you’re asking me.”

“Well then make something up!”

“I… I can’t.”

“Why not? You’ve made things up all your life, haven’t you? You’ve faked it all!” Finn was shouting now, “I told you everything about myself. _Everything_. My deepest fears, my greatest losses, my loneliness, my hopes…I bet you were laughing to yourself, weren’t you? At how gullible I was. How easily manipulated. Mocking me, while I laid myself _fucking bare_ in front of you. It was all just an act for you, wasn’t it?”

“Finn, it was never-”

“Loss, longing, love… a connection with somebody, a sense of belonging… that never meant anything to you, did it? You’ve faked it all, haven’t you? You’ve pretended to be a good person all your life, haven’t you? A good citizen? A good soldier? A good friend? You’ve pretended to not be a monster all your life, haven’t you? But you are. You are a monster. Aren’t you?”

“I am,” Poe’s broken voice managed, “I am. Finn, I’m so sorry-”

“Then why? Why is it so hard for you to tell me you never loved me? That you only wanted to fuck me? Just say it.”

“Finn, I can’t-”

“Just say it. Say you never loved me.”

“I can’t, Finn. I can’t say it.”

“Say it, and then, I can walk away.”

“I’m so sorry, Finn. But I do,” tears had begun to fall down Poe’s cheeks. “I do. I do love you.”

Finn slapped him hard across his cheek with the back of his right hand. “Coward,” he cursed at him, voice dripping with hatred.

“I am,” Poe replied. “A coward.”

“Then why are you telling me this? You could’ve hidden it all from me, like you have for the past year. You didn’t _have_ to tell me.”

“I know.”

“That’s not a good enough answer,” Finn growled.

“I love you.”

“That’s _not_ a good enough answer!” Finn shouted. His hand tingled from wanting to hit the man again, but he restrained himself.

“Answer me this,” Finn said, after a moment, “If you’re the one who is the spy, then why am I the main suspect?”

Poe looked down at his hands. “I _was_ the main suspect… before you. The CIA found out that I was under suspicion… and decided to frame someone else.”

“Someone else?”

“You. They framed you.”

Finn scoffed, a cold, humorless thing. “So, you mean, _you_ framed me? To save your own skin?”

Poe’s eyes darted to Finn’s, a look of pure hurt in his eyes. “ _No_. I would never, you hear me, _never_ do that. If it was up to me, I would have let myself be executed before I could I have hurt you like I have now. I would rather the Secret Police have killed me months ago, had made me disappear, than know I’ve caused you _this_ much pain.”

“And you think that would have made me happy?” Finn said, “Seeing you disappear like that? Not knowing why? You think I wouldn’t have spent every single waking moment trying to find out what happened? Until it killed me?”

He was crying now, tears falling in streams down his cheeks. Poe wanted to reach out and wipe them off. “I’m sorry, Finn,” was all he could say.

“Save it, Poe,” Finn snapped, harshly.

“Why are you telling me this _now_?” Finn asked after a while.

“They’re going to execute you, Finn.”

“And?”

“I can’t just let that happen.”

Finn scoffed, “And?”

Poe breathed in. “You’re going to America.”

Finn eyes widened. “What did you say?”

“I said, I’m sending you to America.”

“Like hell you are.”

“Finn, didn’t you hear what I said? They’re going to _execute_ you!”

“And if _you_ think I care for you so little that I’m not prepared to fucking die for you, in this god-forsaken shithole of a city, _by your side,_ ” Finn paused, “then you are sorely fucking mistaken.”

“Finn-”

“I’m leaving.”

Finn stood up from his chair abruptly and walked towards the door, but Poe caught him before he could leave, tangling their limbs together, his hand clutching his neck like a lifeline.

Poe looked into his eyes. “Finn, please. Please, just think about this, rationally-”

“I have thought about it, and I’m not-”

“Will you just listen to me for one goddamned second?” Poe shouted, “You will get _executed_ here. You hear me? _Executed_. It may be today. It may be tomorrow. But they have got _all_ the evidence they need to execute you. They will come to your house at night, shoot you full of heroin and make it look like a fucking overdose, I don’t know. But if you continue this pig-headedness of yours, you will fucking _die_! Do you _understand_ that?”

“And do you understand that the only thing I have ever wanted is to serve _this_ country? Not America. _Germany. My_ people. To see this war end, and do some real good for this godforsaken place. To see that damned wall collapse, and _not_ work for the people who are making sure that that never happens, that the German people are never free. That’s the only reason I joined the military. Because I thought I might be able to do some good from here. Help-”

“‘ _Build a better future.’_ Yeah, I know!”

“They may hate me, they may want to kill me for my fucking guts, but goddamn it, if I won’t work till my last dying breath to get this country back together. Are you trying to take that away from me? The _only_ sense of purpose I have ever had?”

“No, you dumb idiot, I’m not trying to take that away from you! But you can’t build _shit_ , if you’re dead. And believe me, you will be within a week, if you don’t leave the country as soon as possible. The people you’re trying to change, the country you’re trying to help make better, it doesn’t give a flying _fuck_ if you’re innocent or not,” he paused, biting down the hatred for that reality. A country, people, who could possibly have it in them to hurt Finn. “They won’t hold a trial for you. Don’t expect any justice in the death you’re going to suffer. Are those the people you want to stay for? People who’d rather have you hang than listen to what you have to say?”

“And you think when I get to America, your CIA pals will let me live my life in peace, as if I was just another ordinary citizen?! You think I’ll get the good life and be allowed to spew my ideas, willy-nilly, however I want. Freedom is an illusion, Poe! You _know_ what they’re going to do. They’re gonna use my knowledge of this goddamned city like a fucking weapon against the Soviets. They’re going to make me their fucking bitch, stuck in the endless crushing cycle of information and _war_! _Just like you are!_ Stuck! I am _not_ going to America.”

“But at least you’ll be alive!”

“What life, Poe? What life were you living before you met me? You were living in a haze, going from work to home and back, passing along any information you had through secret channels to people you didn’t know, to kill people _you didn’t know_! Is that what you want for me? To be barely living, in a foreign land, doing something I despise?”

“Would you rather die a meaningless, pitiful death here? Buried in an unmarked grave, with no one to mourn you? What purpose does that serve?”

“Well, what purpose does my going to America serve?”

“It keeps you alive!”

“Why do you care if I live?!”

“Because I love you, goddammit!”

Silence hung between them for a moment, both too breathless from all the shouting to talk. Anger and passion burned deep in Poe’s eyes and Finn’s were watery with unshed tears. Neither knew how to convince the other, so Poe just crushed Finn’s mouth with his, hoping that if anything, his own breathless moans could persuade him.

“Please, Finn, please…” Poe begged him, “Please, just listen to me.”

“I’ll never be able to come back to Germany again, Poe. They’d kill me on the spot.”

“I know, Finn, I know. I understand. But please. Please don’t choose a meaningless death over life.”

“Even if the life is meaningless too?”

“Even so.”

“Without you?”

“Without me,” Poe nodded.

“This isn’t fair,” Finn buried his head in Poe’s shoulder, tears falling steadily on his uniform jacket that still hung around Poe’s shoulders. "I told you. I told you, I wouldn't be able to handle it. Remember? I told you not to leave me."

“I know, love…” Poe sighed, “I remember.”

"And you said you wouldn't," Finn sobbed.

"I'm sorry, Finn..."

"This isn't fair," Finn said, through gritted teeth, raising his head, to lock his lips with Poe's again, "This isn't fair," he growled against his skin.

The kiss tasted salty from Finn’s tears and Poe’s heart broke a little at that.

“I wish you had never met me,” Poe muttered brokenly against his skin, his own tears mixing with Finn’s on his cheek.

Finn searched his eyes, finding his searing sincerity gazing back at him.

“I don’t wish that,” Finn replied.

“I wish I could disappear and you would never have to look at me again,” Poe cried.

Finn scoffed at that, and Poe looked up at him in confusion.

“What is it?”

“That is exactly what I was thinking about myself a few days ago. I thought you hated me,” Finn said, “But you didn’t, did you?”

“No,” Poe replied, “I could never.”

“I don’t wish I had never met you, Poe. I wish I never had to be away from you ever again. But we’ll both have to be away for a while, won’t we?”

“Yeah…” Poe breathed heavily. “But it’s okay, isn’t it?” Poe asked, his voice soft, innocent, like Finn hadn’t heard in a long time, “We’ll be okay, right?”

“Yeah,” Finn smiled, “We’ll be okay.”

 

* * *

 

 

** Winter, 1984 **

It had been six months since Finn left him.

His apartment felt emptier than ever. His brain, emptier so without Finn’s kind brown eyes constantly occupying the space inside his head. He had had no dreams, and he had had no sleep. Only nightmares. His insomnia had returned almost like an old friend, rearing its ugly head at Finn’s absence.

It _had_ been difficult, adjusting without him. The rare nights when he could fall asleep, even just for a few hours, his dreams were of him, dying in all sorts of unimaginably gruesome ways, and he would wake up, his shirt soaked through with sweat, his heart beating too fast from how real the fear felt (how real the fear was) and all he wanted was to feel the muscles of Finn’s back turned away from him as he slept. But his hands felt nothing when he reached out for the man’s warmth.

He had started working longer hours at work, trying to avoid his cold empty apartment, trying to keep himself busy at any cost. He had tried to exhaust himself into a dreamless sleep, but even that wouldn’t work; his body would just shut down of its own accord, his fears conjuring up more horrifying scenarios of Finn dying, dreams of which plagued his unconscious mind and seeped into his every waking moment of every day.

The worst part was, he hadn’t even received so much as a phone call from him yet. Not even a letter. He knew Finn was alright, the handler he had negotiated his exchange with had kept him well-informed. But his heart still ached to hear the man’s voice.

Finn called him, one unusually cold October night from a small phone box on the side of a highway. He was driving back to his apartment, when his car had broken down in the snow, and Finn had had no choice but to take refuge in the little booth for a few hours until morning. He had a few pennies left over, and before he could think about it, he had dialed Poe’s number.

“Halo?” Poe said, in German.

“Hey, Poe,” Finn replied, in English this time, “It’s Finn.”

There was silence on the other side for a while before he answered. “Your English has gotten better,” Poe replied.

Finn smiled, despite himself, “You really think so?”

“Yeah, I do. Your accent is barely even there anymore.”

“Yeah, they’ve been trying to beat it out of me,” Finn laughed, “Yours, on the other hand, is still very much there.”

“Ugh. I’ve been living in Germany too damn long,” he sighed, but his tone was playful, cheerful, happy to finally hear Finn’s voice after so long.

“How have you been?” Finn asked.

“Alright.”

“You been sleeping okay?”

“Not really,” Poe admitted.

“I’m sorry,” Finn said.

“You don’t have to be. It’s not as bad as it was before. At least I get two hours of sleep a day these days, instead of a week.”

Finn winced at that, “Still.”

“Don’t worry about it, Finn.”

“I wish I could make it better,” Finn sighed against the phone.

“I know,” Poe said, “How have you been doing?”

“Busy. Just trying to adjust in a new city is difficult. But a whole new country? Impossible.”

“You sound well, though.”

“I am. Mostly.”

“That’s good.”

“I got appointed as a handler today. A new recruit. Her name’s Rey Jakku. She’s British, for some reason. Angry little girl,” Finn laughed, “Curses too much. Downright annoying, sometimes. But she has a good heart.”

“Sounds feisty,” Poe commented.

“She is!” Finn laughed again.

There was silence on the cords connecting them for a while, before Poe broke it.

“Finn…” Poe said softly into the receiver, “Why didn’t you call me sooner?”

Finn went quiet on the other side, his slow breathing the only indication of his still being there. “I thought…” he replied, after a while, “It would hurt too much.”

“And does it?”

“No. I feel… relieved. I didn’t know how much I was craving to hear your voice until I heard it just now.”

“I feel the same way.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t call you sooner.”

“It’s alright, Finn,” Poe said, his tone light-hearted again, “You’re forgiven.”

Finn giggled at that, and Poe smiled at the unexpected sound. “You wanna know what was the first thing I did when I came here?”

“What?”

“Went to records store.”

“Of course, you did,” Poe laughed.

“And guess what the first album I bought was.”

“Which one?”

“Come on, guess!”

“The Dark Side of the Moon?”

“Bingo!” Finn chuckled, “I actually bought a cassette tape. And a Walkman, too. This Rey girl gifted me a pair of earphones the other day and I swear to you, Poe, listening to the album with earphones sounds like you’re in your own little film, and the soundtrack is playing in your ears.”

“Can you buy one for me?” Poe asked, “I don’t think I’ll be able to find one here.”

“Sure! I’ll parcel it to you… or something. How does that sound?”

“That would be fantastic. Thank you.”

Finn could hear the smile in Poe’s voice. He wished he could see it too.

“I know I said I loved ‘Us and Them’ but I think I have a new favorite song from the album.”

“Which one?” Poe asked.

“‘Brain Damage’.”

“Why?”

“There’s this lyric in it, that I’ve really fallen in love with over the past few weeks.”

“Which one?”

“Uh…” Finn paused, “Verse two, line four. Play the record after this call, and listen to it yourself. Will you do that for me?”

“Okay, I will.”

Pause.

“Poe, I-”

“It’s okay, Finn, you don’t have to say anything.”

“No. I just… I just wanted to say…” he paused, “Thank you. For everything,” Finn said, “I don’t know when I’ll be able to call again, but I wanted to tell you that. Thank you…and I love you. Remember that, okay?”

“I… love you too, Finn,” Poe breathed heavily against the receiver, “And I will.”

He hung up first, tears involuntarily falling over his eyelashes onto the paperwork below him. He stood up from his desk chair and went to the drawer and pulled out the old record player and vinyl record from it. He connected the record player to the power supply and put the disc on the turntable.

Once the song started playing, he lay back on the bed and let his head rest against the pillows, imagining Finn’s lithe form wrapped around him, as the music softly played in the background. The image was peaceful, slowly lulling him to sleep, with Finn’s breathy mumbles of “I love you” still in his ear. And just before his eyes closed into another dreamless, numbing sleep, the singer on the record said:

                                                                                    ** _“You rearrange me ‘til I’m sane.”_**

****

****

* * *

 

****

****

****

** May, 1988 **

The man stumbled on to Poe’s porch, an almost-dead girl in his arms and a half open, bloodied cassette cover of “The Dark Side of the Moon” in the other hand, a single address scribbled illegibly on it. The man clutched on to paper like it was his very last hope in this world, his eyes were blood-shot, fear-stricken and panicked.

“Please,” he croaked, “Please help her.”

“Who sent you?” Poe questioned.

“Finn,” the man struggled to say, exhaustion taking over his body, “His name is Finn.”


	9. No Quarter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Based on No Quarter by Led Zeppelin.
> 
> Trigger Warning: Use of Heavy Anti-Semitic language. I apologize in advance. But I feel that it is essential to Snoke's character in this fic. I want to explore how Snoke has emotionally manipulated Kylo, and how he has made him ashamed of his own history, of his own parents, just like Snoke did in canon. I hope you will understand, and that this will not deter you from reading. Thanks, and enjoy!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm so sorry I take so long to update. But I really need to get into a good university, you guys...

**East Berlin, May, 1988**

The last time he had seen his mother, the night before his father died, she had been crying.

They had been fighting again, and their shouts and curses had carried all the way from the living room to his tiny bedroom upstairs. He remembered feeling frightened, huddled beneath the covers of his tiny bed, trying to drown out the yelling and the sound of glass being shattered. He had been afraid that they were fighting about him, afraid that they didn’t want him anymore, afraid that they were going to leave him. And finally, when Leia had come upstairs to check up on him, he had buried his head in his mother’s lap, weeping and pleading for her not to leave him. All the while she ran her hand soothingly through his raven black hair, reassuring him that she loved him more than anything else in the world, and that she couldn’t leave him even if she wanted to because he was just too dear to her. He remembered feeling a few tears fall on his head too, but when he had looked up, Leia’s eyes had been clear, and she was smiling. He had hugged her, and asked her to stay until he could fall asleep. She had promised him she would, but before sleep could take him, he had felt her unwind the boy’s little arms from around her waist, and walk away, her heels clicking behind her.

It was strange, the random things he could remember about her. His mother.

He could not, for the life of him, remember her smile, or what she used to call him, but he remembered _that,_ for some reason. The feelings that rose up and drowned him, drowned the child within him that night. The overwhelming feeling of betrayal, of abandonment, over such trivial a promise broken, had followed him around all his life, despite the many betrayals he would have come to see. But there was something about that night… and that lingering feeling that he had known, even then, that it would be the last time he would see her.

That was probably the… _last_ uncorrupted memory he had of hers. The last memory before, Mom and Dad, Leia and Han, became only The Jew and The Traitor in his mind, the rest of the memories washed away, dissolved even, by years of abuse and torture, to make the perfect soldier. The perfect weapon.

It was strange, yes, but stranger still was why he was remembering such a memory now, of all times.

The man sitting across from him, leaned back in his rotating leather chair, picking up his half-burned cigar from the ash tray beside him and took a deep drag from it as he slid a brown paper file across the table to Kylo.

“Explain,” he stated, casually.

To anyone else, that voice may have seemed indifferent, bored even, but Kylo had known the man for too long to miss the hint of menace and intimidation that laced it. He had heard the voice all his life; it was a voice that brought him pain, and comfort, and reassurance. He knew how that voice sounded when tinged with disapproval; he had had to learn that by trial and error over a matter of decades. He had learned to recognize every little indentation in the man’s voice, the meaning behind each and every shift in tone. He knew how that voice sounded when it inflicted pain; the blows that would follow the slight hitches in the man’s breath, the characteristic “Tch” before he landed a blow so hard, that Kylo would lose his senses to pain. Dull to everything else except the gut-wrenching agony that would seize him as soon as he did. But he also knew how that voice sounded when he would hold Kylo’s boyish, malnourished form in his arms, comforting him, reassuring him that he had _nothing_ to be afraid of. “ _Not from me, anyway_ ,” he’d say, running his fingers soothingly through the boy’s hair, and Kylo could think of no reason not to believe him. He had grown up with that voice, and it had held a dominion over his mind and body for as long as he could remember. He was a cruel man, yes, frightening even, when it came to discipline among his disciples. But he loved them all so much. He had made sure Kylo knew that from the very beginning _. “I do love you, Benjamin”_ , he’d say _, “I do this for you,_ moy khoroshyi.” And those two words had been his comfort. He had concluded long ago that he loved that voice, that threateningly affectionate voice that had been the center of his being since he was six years old. But now he supposed he had _had_ to love that voice, for his own sanity, if not for anything else. Kylo didn’t understand why he was having this realization today, of all days.

 

But for all his familiarity with the man’s voice, his face, so much older and paler now than it was when he had first seen him at that concert in Moscow, was just as unreadable as it had ever been.

“General Snoke, sir,” Kylo began, staring at the deep pits in the man’s forehead, “We were attacked.”

“I can see that much, son,” Snoke replied, an undetectable trace of exasperation in his voice, “Don’t try to be smart with me, boy.”

“Sir, I did not mean to-”

“What happened to the trade?”

“There was no trade, sir.”

The man narrowed his eyes. “Explain,” he repeated.

“Sir. The intel we got from the Americans was incorrect. The Mafia _was_ there, but not to orchestrate a trade, sir. I think we have been fed false information from the very start. Other than the few intelligence operatives in East Berlin, there are none other who can confirm the existence of a disc with the names of the defectors and their whereabouts on it.”

“And why would the Americans lie to us?”

“Well, maybe they’ve already found a similar disc, and want to keep it from us. But I do think it’s unlikely, sir. Most probably, the operatives themselves knew not that the information they were being given was incorrect.”

“And what, pray tell, was the reason the Mafia was at the Embassy then?”

“To lay a trap, sir,” Kylo explained, sitting up straighter in his chair, “As you are aware, sir, that a few members of the Hutt’s family were killed a few months prior. The Mafia was out for revenge, and it seems they found what they were looking for in my fellow operative, Rey Jakku.”

“Hmm…” the man leaned forward, “Interesting theory. And were you, Kylo, aware that this woman was involved in a mission that would jeopardize our objective, and with-held information from me?” There was that hint of intimidation again.

“No, sir, I would not dare do something like that,” Kylo lied, and Snoke seemed to see right through him because he let out a tired “Tch” and Kylo braced himself for a hit, but the older man continued.

“Your negligence will not go unpunished, son, you can be sure of that.”

“I would expect no less for my actions, sir.”

“I would flog you myself, boy - like I used to do at school in the courtyard. Remember that?”

Kylo swallowed, “Yes, sir. I do.”

The General coughed into the palm of his hand, and removed the cigar from his lips, “But unfortunately, we’re running quite out of time, and I would like nothing more than to rid myself of these America pigs as soon as possible and go back to being on opposite sides. So, tell me,” Snoke said, “Where is the bitch now?”

“Dead, sir.”

“I see. And what did you do with the body?”

“I left it at the explosion site at the Embassy. She must have shown up at some hospital as an unidentified victim. I didn’t bother to check.”

“I see,” the man repeated, “Well, that puts us at quite an advantage then, doesn’t it?”

“I suppose it does, sir.”

“You haven’t shared this knowledge with anyone else yet, have you?”

“No, sir, I have not.”

“Well, then, my boy, the objectives of your mission have not changed. You are to continue to search for Luke Skywalker. We have a bit of time before the Americans figure out that they’ve lost the girl, and that should be more than enough time to eliminate this unhappy alliance, and send you back to Moscow before any Americans discover your trail.”

“Yes, sir, that would be most suitable.”

“I supposed this is a blessing in disguise, then,” the man had started coughing again, and so he took another deeper drag from the cigar, huffing it out in annoyance.

“Sir…”

“What is it, boy?”

“What exactly are my orders if I manage to find Skywalker? Rey and I… we were meant to find him, but the orders for what to do in case we succeeded were never made entirely clear to either of us.”

Snoke looked at him for a moment, those uncomfortably blue eyes boring into his soul, and dropped the butt of his cigarette into the ash tray.

“The Americans and the KGB had decided before that if you were both to find him, you were to bring him at a mutually agreed upon location for questioning. But now that the mangy bitch is dead, I’m revising your orders.”

Kylo waited.

“Kill him,” Snoke finally said, “He is nothing but trouble to the Motherland, Kylo. And he is a danger to our peace. The information he has could rattle the foundations of our very nation. You wouldn’t want the Motherland to suffer now, would you, Kylo?”

It was a test, this was the voice he’d use when he was testing him. “No, sir,” Kylo replied, stoic, and without delay, “Absolutely not.”

“So, kill him,” he stated simply.

“Yes, sir.”

“That will be all, Kylo,” Snoke motioned for him to leave his office.

“Sir…”

“Out with it, boy!” the man bellowed suddenly, and Kylo’s fingers trembled where they lay against the cold wood of the table.

“Sir,” he began, “Don’t you think I have a conflict of interest in this mission?”

Snoke narrowed his eyes. “Whatever do you mean, boy?”

Kylo remained silent and lowered his eyes from the man’s cold blue gaze.

“Ah, I see. You mean through that whore of a mother of yours?”

Kylo hesitated, and by the way Snoke dragged his chair back to approach him, he knew he really shouldn’t have. “Y-yes,” he replied.

The older man scoffed, a humorless, unkind thing and stared back at Kylo. “You wouldn’t put a _doting, loving uncle_ above the state of the Motherland, now, would you, Kylo?”

“No, sir. Never.”

“Then why would it be a conflict of interest? I knew what I was doing when I put you on this job, Kylo. Sure, you share blood with the bastard. Despite my vehement efforts to beat that filthy Jewish blood out of you, it stays. But I like to think that I trained you well enough not to betray me. Didn’t I, _Ben_?”

Kylo flinched at the name, and Snoke smiled to himself, victorious, “Yes, sir. No doubt about it, sir.”

“Good,” the man praised affectionately, standing mere inches away from Kylo’s seat now. The man still kept his head lowered, waiting for something. A sting of pain, the sharp crack of a whip hitting his back, anything. “Consider this your final time to show me your loyalty to me.”

“Final, sir?” Kylo asked timidly.

“Yes, final. After this, you will have truly become my child.”

He pulled Kylo’s head to his chest, and smoothed out his disheveled hair with the heel of his palm, carding through the locks, with such care he would show at only the rarest of occasions. Kylo didn’t know why, but it made his heart soar.

“I will not let you down, sir.”

“Good,” Snoke said, “Don’t betray me now, you hear.”

“I won’t, sir,” he replied. _I can’t_.  

“Good boy,” Snoke stroked the younger man’s hair. “Don’t make me put you back in the hole, son.”

The man must have felt Kylo’s heartbeat spike, and he clutched at his hair stronger, keeping him in place. “Now, now… As long as you don’t do anything to disappoint me, I won’t be angry.”

Kylo didn’t want to press his cheek against the man’s chest, but he did. It felt comfortable, familiar. The man’s grip loosened and he continued to brush his fingers through his hair.

“You know I love you so.”

It was a test, it was a test. Every neuron of his brain was screaming at him at the blatant ingenuity of the man’s statement. It had never been true, Kylo knew that. The logical part of his brain did. But he wanted to believe it _so badly_. And so, he shushed his reason, and replied, emotion bleeding through every word.

“Yes, sir. My life is yours,” he said, the lines he had been rehearsing since he was six years old. Without meaning to, Kylo let a tear fall onto the other man’s shirt, and clutched at it tightly. He wanted to believe it. He wanted to, so, _so_ badly.

But no matter how much he wanted to deny it, he could hear the uncertainty in his own reply as it left his lips. The emotion in it was as resounding as ever, but the clarity and devotion that was once there was replaced now by something far more …ominous, and he wondered when it was that he had begun believing his own lies lesser and lesser.


	10. Dies Irae, Dies Illa

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Requiem: a Mass in the Catholic Church offered for the repose of the soul or souls of one or more deceased persons.  
> "Dies Irae, Dies Illa" translates to "Day of wrath and Doom impending." It is a Latin hymn that has been used as a musical quotation in many works, including Mozart's, Liszt's and Saint-Saens's. This particular chapter features Liszt's "Totentanz" which translates to "Dance with Death". "Dies Irae" is part of the same hymn of which "Lacrimosa" is also a part, which as you may remember was the focus for Chapter 5. 
> 
> In honor of this fic hitting 1600 hits (those who are applying to university know why this number is so awesome), I decided to post this chapter a little early before January 1. Happy New Year, everybody! I hope you had a lovely Christmas! Here's another chapter filled with metaphors and allegory and foreshadowing. Enjoy!

** Moscow, June 1988 **

The General was playing again.

She couldn’t remember the last time she had seen him play. It had been ages ago, she was sure, and even then, he had never been particularly good at it either. His strokes had always been too rough, his presses brusque, blunt and brutish. Untrained and untamed; he pushed down on the ivory keys as if he wanted to bruise them. The piano, on the other hand, was a delicate instrument. But General Snoke was not a man of delicate things.

Even she, as musically untalented as she was, could hear that the notes were completely out of place, the tune broken, fragmentary; jarring in places where its pianist would roughly strike the keys in frustration, and the instrument would mewl in protest. The piano was not an instrument to be struck. It was an instrument to be caressed, to be coaxed gently into submission with a care and compassion cultivated over a matter of decades. General Snoke commanded loyalty by fear, but the piano was not so cowardly an instrument to be won over by that alone.

It was not for the cruel-hearted, the piano. It was too gentle and too soft; too perceptive not to realize the intentions of its players, too strong-willed to allow itself to be subjugated by them. It was an instrument for lovers, for people who loved so deeply and unselfishly that they let it consume them. Not for monsters like her, or General Snoke. She had only ever seen one man, at least in her line of work, play the piano the way it deserved to be played; soft, bell-like notes, flowing together in a melody as seamlessly as clear water in a rivulet. But then again, _he_ had been the scariest monster of them all.

The sounds of the piano filled the hallway as she peaked through the slightly-ajar door. The General was sitting at his bench, the silhouette of his stiff back shrouded in the shadow of the 9 o’clock Muscovite sun. Snoke’s playing was nothing compared to the man’s. His movements had always been too rigid, too unfeeling; his bony fingers too inflexible to reach the keys.

“ _Blyat_ ,” he cursed in frustration as he struck the wrong key once again, and slammed the fallboard down on the keyboard.

She couldn’t turn around fast enough.

“Phasma?” Snoke inquired, turning his body towards her on the bench, “Is that you, girl?”

The General’s blue eyes met hers, that hideous scar across his forehead flaring in… anger? Annoyance? Some kind of displeased sentiment, Phasma concluded, in her analysis of the man’s twisted features. Even after a lifetime of knowing him, he really was quite unreadable to her still. She straightened her back, her head missing the door frame by mere inches, and ran a hand nervously through her cropped blonde hair, trying to present her most innocent self.

“Yes, sir,” she said, “You called for me.”

The General’s eyes narrowed in something like irritation, yet despite that, he called her in and reached for his walking cane to stand up.

“You’re early,” he complained.

“I apologize, sir.”

“Where did you learn your manners, girl?” he scolded, “Didn’t I teach you not to spy on people’s private affairs?” he said, coughing into his palm and making his way towards the grand oak desk by the windows.

Phasma wanted to cackle at the irony of the question, and the man himself seemed to have realized so mere moments after uttering it. The woman valued her life enough not to point it out.

Snoke moved towards his desk, thumping down against his chair, out of breath. The man really was getting too old. Not that he didn’t strike fear in her heart still, or in any other operative working under him, but it _was_ hard to take him seriously when she towered nearly two feet above the slouching man and could take him as easily as any of those sniveling boys she had known at school. Not that she’d walk out alive if she did. She had estimated once how long she would survive if she actually went through with it one of these days. She had counted three minutes. That is, of course, if the guards didn’t hear the sounds of the struggle or of whatever weapon she would use to kill him. The room, and the building itself, was surrounded on all sides by guards, four stationed just on the entrance of the hallway from which she had entered. “The Praetorian Guards,” they called themselves. Some Roman bullshit. She’d never really had much patience for the General’s soliloquies to know exactly what the name had meant.

But, _of course_ , that was not to say she didn’t respect him immensely. (At least on the outside.)

Phasma, real name Petra Maslek, was seventeen when she had joined the First Order. If she had had her pick of masters, she would definitely not have chosen Snoke. Instead, she would have chosen someone more soft-spoken and gentler, which is to say, someone she could have seduced easily with her body. But unfortunately, she didn’t really have much of a choice in the matter; the yearly litter of unclaimed Soviet orphans went to the First Order, always and without fail, to be trimmed and broken and created anew, molded into the perfect batch of loyal bloodhounds for the Motherland. She’d been one of the oldest in her pack, less impressionable than the other pups; her skin already tough and unpliable, her metaphorical canines already sharp and ready to bury themselves in the necks of those who would dare harm her. If she was on the streets, these traits would have ensured her survival. Here, though, it meant only more trimming and more molding for her. She took it effortlessly, presenting herself as pliant and obedient and loyal. But by twenty-five, nearly all of her torturers were dead, most by her hand, and nearly all by her doing. It was pitiful how easy some of them had fallen, these men who called themselves the soldiers of the Motherland. For some, it had taken less than a batting of the eyelashes and a glance at the milky white skin of her thigh. For others it had taken long thought-out maneuvers, and a rumor or two in the right direction. Yet, all had fallen, sooner or later.

Except two.

The one she wanted to replace, and the one who stood in her way. The scariest monsters she had ever met.

Kylo Ren had never been part of the litter. He didn’t eat with them, didn’t talk with them, didn’t sleep with them. From what she had heard, he’d been with Snoke since the days the First Order was only in its infancy, only beginning to set its roots in the structure of the KGB. She had speculated that he was Snoke’s son, but it took only one look at the two of them side by side to know that that could never be true. Snoke’s eyes were harsh, skin ghastly pale, the structure of his face intimidating and cruel, even if one was unaware of the things he had done. Kylo, on the other hand, didn’t even look like he was meant to be a spy. In fact, with his dark brown wavy curls and the soft brown of his eyes, she had thought he would fit rather well in some middle-class domestic job. Even if, most times she met him, the man’s expression perpetually looked like someone had taken a hammer to his spirits (which, now that she thought of it, wasn’t all that far from the truth).  But Phasma had only to take one unfortunate look at his record to lay that picture to rest forever. These two were barbaric on a level she wouldn’t be humanly capable of, even if she had tried.

Hence, understandably, killing them was not something she readily wanted to gamble her life on. In fact, she would have liked for nature and circumstance to take their course and do her job for her. But even they had failed her. And if she would be foolhardy enough to take up the task by herself? She didn’t even want to imagine the things that bloodhound would do to her if she ever tried. And Snoke? Well. He was close to dying now anyway, she could think up a ploy after that.  

 

“You’re awfully quiet today, girl,” the General commented.

“Am I, sir?”

“Yes,” the man reached inside his drawer and picked out a gramophone recording, “Go and play this for me, will you?” he said, pointing towards the golden gramophone at the far end of the room.

Phasma took the square envelope from him, pulled out the vinyl recording and moved towards the player. After a minute or two of fumbling with the needles, the track began.  

“Is this the same piece you were trying to play just now?” Phasma blurted out, silently reprimanding herself for her comment.

Snoke scoffed. “I’ve always liked you, Phasma. But sometimes, you really do push your luck.”

“I apologize, sir,” the woman folded her arms behind her back.

“Yes,” the General replied, clicking open the cigarette case on his desk, “It is the one I was _trying_ to play, as you so eloquently put it,” he glared towards her again, “You recognize it?”

“I think so,” she replied, “Totentanz, is it? Liszt’s?”

“That’s right.”

“Ah, I see. You were playing the ‘ _Dies Irae’_ part, then.”

“I was,” he coughed and lit his cigarette, then added, quieter this time, as if she were not meant to hear it “… sometimes I feel like I’m playing a requiem for myself…”

“I’m sorry?”

“Nothing, girl,” he said, waving a file towards her, “Here. I didn’t invite you here for chit-chat, you know.”

“I’m sorry, sir.”

“Mm-hmm,” he nodded, and then, “He’s getting out of control.”

“Who is, sir?” Phasma asked, approaching the general and taking the file from his hand.

The General took a long drag from his cigarette. Phasma waited.

“Kylo,” he answered finally, the name falling from his thin disease-stricken lips with the smoky exhale of tobacco.

The woman’s brows furrowed in confusion. The golden boy in trouble? She knew Snoke kept tabs on him and all: he had that other dog Hux for that. But she couldn’t remember him ever expressing his distrust in Kylo before. Phasma’s heart glowed with joy.

“This goddamned Pole,” Snoke grunted out, slurring his words, wincing as he hoisted his feet up on the table, “has been a pain in my ass for nearly… half a century,” Phasma couldn’t tell if the General was inebriated or not; he had never been this talkative about an assignment before, keeping his reasons and his ramblings to himself for most of the time, “I wish the Germans would’ve invaded sooner so he would never have been born, the sneaky little rat,” he continued, “Forty years, I’ve been looking for him. Keeps slipping through my fingers, that bastard…”

“Excuse me, sir?” Phasma questioned.

“Luke,” he offered in way of explanation, “Skywalker,” he added.

“Ah…” now it made sense. “Kylo’s been looking for him, hasn’t he? With that CIA operative?”

“He was, until a week ago. The bitch got herself killed. So now the deal with the Americans is off. And we’re back where we started. With no leads. At all.”

“Why…” Phasma started, cleared her throat, “Why _are_ we looking for him, sir? He can’t possibly be that-”

The General shot her a look that told her she had already said too much, and Phasma decided to hold her tongue. _‘Curiosity killed the cat_ ,’ was never as true a proverb as it was during a conversation with Snoke.

“What is my objective, sir?” she asked instead.

“I think…” the General began again, fishing out a small metallic flask from the drawer underneath his table. He took a swig from it, and Phasma hoped she had not spooked the conversation away from Kylo. “There is a weakness in this boy,” Snoke continued, “One I have not been able to weed out yet. And that when the time comes, Kylo will not be able to take care of business.”

Snoke took a drag from his cigarette; Phasma held her questions.

“Follow him. That file has Kylo’s current locations in the city. This is your top mission now, Phasma. It may take years for Kylo to track him down, but you are never to lose him. _Ever_. Follow him, right up to the door of Skywalker, and if he doesn’t put a bullet through him first, I am giving you the permission to do so.”

“Kill Skywalker, sir?”

“Yes,” he replied, another sip from his flask, then added, “Both of them.”

Phasma’s eyes widened, the faint piano in the background not an adequate soundtrack for the emotions she was feeling. For years, she had tried to separate Kylo from his master, take his place as Snoke’s pet, his next-in-line, but all in vain. And now, by some goddamned stroke of fortune, the man himself was presenting her the opportunity on a silver platter? No, she took it back. It was perfect, the soundtrack. It was a soundtrack fit to be played at momentous occasions such as these. _A requiem indeed_ , she thought. For the pet _and_ the master. Two birds with one stone.

 

Later that day, Phasma walked out of the same hallway, file tucked beneath her heavy green winter coat, visor cap perfect on her short blonde hair, giddy with thoughts of murder and power.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kylo is the piano. I'm sorry that there was, again, no Rey in this chapter. I promise this is still a Reylo fic lol.


End file.
